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CHRONOLOGY 



NG AGE. 




NITT, 

CHUTIA NAGPUR. 



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RAND, LONDON 

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UDRAPHASTHA OR 
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^ALE OF I 



HISTORY AND CHRONOLOGY 



OF THE 



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MYTH-MAKING AGE. 



BY 



J. F. HEWITT, 



LATE COMMISSIONER OF CHUTIA NAGPUR. 



Witb /Ifcap, plates, anD Diagrams. 



fanus flarlbr antr €o. 

31 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, LONDON 

AND 27 BROAD STREET, OXFORD. 
M DCCCC I. 



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CONTENTS. 



Preface 

BOOK I. 
Chapter I. 
Chapter 



. ix. — xlvii. 
THE AGE OF POLE STAR WORSHIP. 



II. 



Introductory Sketch 

The years of two seasons and 
five-day weeks measured by the 
movements of the pleiades and 
the Solstitial Sun 

A. Birth of life from the Mother Tree 

B. Date of the belief in the Pole Star parent-god 

C. The original week of five days 

D. The diffusion through the world of the five- 

days week .... 

Chapter III. The year of three seasons and 

'FIVE-DAY WEEKS RULED BY ORION 
THE DEER-SUN-GOD 

A. Progress of the Northern emigration of the 

Indian founders of villages 

B. The men of the bow 

C Substitution of Orion for Can opus as the 
leading star-god 

D. The sun-circle of three hundred and sixty 

degrees .... 

E. The southward emigration ot the Neolithic 

builders of stone monuments, and of the 
men of the Palaeolithic age, and the his- 
tory of Pottery 

Chapter IV. The year of three seasons of six- 
day WEEKS RULED BY THE EEL- 
GOD, THE PARENT-FISH OF THE 
SONS OF THE RIVERS 

A. The sons of the rivers . 
a 2 



21 76 

23—3 6 
36—40 
41 — 47 

47 — 76 



77 — 124 



77- 
8i- 



-81 
-87 



87 — 104 



104 — 106 



107 — 124 



125—199 
125—142 



IV 



Contents. 



Chapter IV. {continued): — »• 

B. The Antelope race, the phallus worshippers 

and house builders . 

C. The Kushika Faun house-builders in Greece 

and Italy . 

D. The gods of the six-days week . 

E. Immigration of the sons of the rivers and 

the antelope into India 



PAGE 
142 l6l 

l6l — 165 
I65 — I73 

173— T 99 



BOOK II. THE AGE OF LUNAR-SOLAR WORSHIP. 



Chapter 

A. 
B. 
C. 
D. 
E. 
F. 
G. 
H. 

I. 
J- 



V. The epoch of the three-years 

CYCLE AND OF THE NINE-DAYS WEEK 

Birth of the sun-god dated by Zodiacal stars 

The Khati or Hittites . 

The worship of sexless and bisexual gods . 

The festivals of the three-years cycle 

Human Sacrifices 

Incense worship and international trade 

Plant worship 

Emigration of the men of this age as told 

by their monuments . 
Story of the tower of the three-years cycle . 
The Indian and European land tenures of 

this age .... 



Chapter VI. The year of the horse's head of 

ELEVEN MONTHS AND ELEVEN-DAY 
WEEKS 

A. The genealogy of the sun-god with the 

horse's head and the ritual of his worship 

B. The Sun-physician 

C The New Year's Day of the eleven-months 
year 

D. The horses of the sun-chariot 

E. The Thibetan year of eleven months 

F. The connection between this year and cere 

monial hair-cutting . , 



200 — 293 
205 — 214 
215 — 220 
220 — 236 

23 6 — 2 45 
245—248 
248—259 
259 — 261 

261 — 278 

278—287 

287—293 



294—381 

296—305 
305— 3*4 

314—328 
328—330 
33°— 337 

333—347 



Contents. 



Chapter VI. {continued) 



G. The Bronze Age in India . . 348 — 365 
H. The story of the two thieves who robbed 

the treasure-house of heaven . . 365 — 381 

BOOK III. SOLAR WORSHIP. 
Chapter VII. The fifteen-months year of the 

SUN-GOD OF THE EIGHT-RAYED 

STAR AND THE EIGHT-DAYS WEEK 382 — 492 

The birth of the Sun-god born of the Thigh 389 — 408 
The story of Tobit and Jack the Giant 

Killer, builder of the altar of the eight 

and nine-day weeks . . . 4°8 — 4 22 

The Hindu gods of the eight-days week . 422 — 432 

The year of the Mahommedan Twins . 432 — 433 
The Roman gods of the year of eight-day 

weeks and the year of Lug . . 433 — 455 

The year of Odusseus as god of the Thigh . 455 — 462 
The year of the birth of the Buddha and 

Parikshit as sun-gods . . 462 — 490 

Patroclus as a year-god of this year . 490 — 492 



A. 
B. 



C. 
D. 
E. 

F. 
G. 

H. 



Chapter VIII. The years of seven-day weeks 

AND SEVENTEEN AND THIRTEEN 

MONTHS . . . 493 — 560 

A. The ritual of the making of the fire-pan 

(Ukha) and the birth from it of the sun-god 495—499 

B. The Vajapeya sacrifice of this year . 499 — 506 
C The Chariot-races of the sun-god of this 

year .... 506—511 

D. Odusseus and other Greek year-gods rulers 

of the seventeen and thirteen-months 

year .... 512—519 

E. The thirteen-months year of the Santals, 

the thirteen wives of Kashyapa and the 

thirteen Buddhist Theris . • S I 9~ 5 2 4 

F. The years of seventeen and thirteen months 

in the Mahabharata chronology . 524 — 530 



vi Contents. 

Chapter VIII. {continued) : — 

PAGE 

G. The seventeen and thirteen-months year in 

Egypt .... 530—535 

H. The thirteen-months year of the Nooktas 

of British Columbia . . . 535 — 537 

I. The May perambulations of boundaries dat- 
ing from this year . . . 537 — 54 2 

J. The perambulations of boundaries in Gubbio 

and Echternach . . . 542 — 559 

K. The ritual of the building of the Garhapatya 

altar of this thirteen-months year . 559 — 560 

Chapter IX. The years of eighteen and 

TWELVE MONTHS, AND OF FIVE 

AND TEN-DAY WEEKS . . 561 6l6 

A. The Hindu year of eighteen months and 

» that of the Mayas of Mexico . . 561 — 566 

B. The antelope and snake-dances of Mexico . 566 — 575 

C. Indian history of the epoch following the 

eighteen-months year as told in the Ma- 
habharata .... 576 — 585 

D. The conquest of the Bharata merchant-kings 

by the Sanskrit-speaking sun-worshippers 585 — 598 

E. The twelve-months year ot the sun-wor- 

shippers .... 598 — 601 

F. History as told in the ritual of the building 

of the brick altar of the sun-bird of the 
twelve-months year . . . 601^616 

Appendix A. List of the Hindu Nakshatra 

Stars by Brahma Gupta . 617 — 618 

Appendix B. The House that Jack built. The 
English, Talmud, and Basque Ver- 
sions . . . 619 — 626 

Appendix C. History as told in the variant 

FORMS OF THE LEGEND OF INO, 
THE MOTHER OF MEL1CERTES, OR 



Contents. 



VII 



Appendix C. (continued) : — 



Index 



Melquarth, the Tvrian Hera- 
kles, the goddess of the kre- 
demnon or zodiacal ribbon . 627 — 642 

643 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 
Plate I. The Conversion of St. Hubert, 

CALLED IN THE SaMA JaTAKA 

Piliyakkha. From the Picture by 
Albert Durer . 

Plate II. Pictorial Creed of the Hittite 
Worshippers of the bisexual 
Father and Mother Plant. 
From Iasilikaia in Cilicia 

Plate III. The Yucatan God of Copan cum- 
ahau, Lord of the Bowl, de- 
picted as the Indian elephant- 
headed God Gan-isha, Lord of 
the Land, seated on the double 
Su-astika. From a photograph of 
the cast given by Mr. A. Maudslay 
to the South Kensington Museum . 

Plate IV. Cross at Palenque, representing 
the bird slain by the arrow, 
its shaft, and dissected by the 
Augur Priest on the left. A 
variant form of the story of Rigveda 
IV. 27, of Shyena, the Pole Star 
bird shot by Krishanu, the Rainbow 
archer-god. Drawn from the Photo- 
graph of a Plaster Cast given by 
Mr. A. Maudslay to the South 
Kensington Museum 

Map of Ancient Northern India 



to face p. 92 



259 



47i 



1 574 
Title 



ERRATA. 

Page xviii, line 3— for with read on. 
,, 38, line 29— for Seb read Set. 
,, 89, line 21— for Mriga-sirsha read Marga-sirsha. 

„ 120, line it,— for Loblic read Lob lie. 
,, 132, line 12— for sons Ida. read sons of Ida. 

,, 164, line 22— for branch read bunch. 

,, 173, in title of Section E—for raven read rivers. 

,, 191, line 30 —for Friga read Freya. 

„ 193, line 27— for governments read government. 

„ 201, line 1$— for or read on. 

,, 229, line 16— for Yuys read Yms. 

„ 233, line 19— for Allah read Allat. 

,, 239, line 22— for grain raza? grass. 
5J ,, line 34— for with the raw? with that. 

„ 243, line 5—/^ Elaphebohon ran/ Elaphebolion. 

„ 244, lines 2, 9, i 4 _/ or Dionysius rai Dionysos. 

,, 312, line 18— for a part, read a participle. 

,, 336, line 29— for began read begun. 

„ 369, Hne 5-for mother, the sun-god W mother of the sun-god. 

,, 374. hne 12— after goose-mother read was. 

» 393. line 21— for Pitadaru read Pitu-daru. 

v 419. Hne 26— for of read or. 

„ 428, line 23- for Mrigasirsha read Marga-sirsha. 

,, 43°. line 2— for end read and. 

,, line 10- for Mriga-sirsha razsT Marga-sirsha. 

„ 491, line 16— for awning read aweing. 

,, 513, line 30— for cup read cap. 

» . 535. line 25— for flax ma/ fibrous. 

» 543. line 18- for Vista ;W Vesta. 

.. 559, line 28— for flax raw/ fibrous. 

" t 5 : l^V' ? I4 ~^ Mri § a ' sirs ^ «* Marga-sirsha. 

„ 5 7 1 , line 6- for Uz ma/ by. 

» ' 574, line 25-afoer priest omit who. 



-6-e^ ^j/fr £lr^ ^ 
PREFACE. 

— ^ 

THE Myth-making Age, the history of which I have 
sketched in this book, comprises the whole period 
from the first dawn of civilisation, and the initial efforts 
made in organising self-governing communities of human 
beings, down to the time when the sun entered Taurus at 
the Vernal Equinox between 4000 and 5000 B.C. In fixing 
the dates I have calculated from the recorded position of 
the sun at the different seasons of the year from which time 
was measured, I have treated this event as occurring about 
4200 B.C. This I have generally used as the pivot date from 
which I have deduced all- others similarly calculated. But 
I have not in any of the authors I have consulted been able 
to find any exact year fixed on trustworthy astronomical 
authority for this event, and I have found that some writers 
place it tentatively at 4700 B.C. It is a date which I am 
quite unable to determine, and one which if it is exactly 
soluble can only be fixed by astronomers. But it seems 
to be certainly assumed by all who have dealt with the 
subject, that this closing event of the Myth-making Age 
certainly fell between 4000 and 5000 B.C. It was then, 
as I show in Chapter IX., that it ceased to be a universally 
observed national custom to record history in the form of 
historic myths, and that national history began to pass out 
of the mythic stage into that of annalistic chronicles re- 
cording the events of the reigns of kings and the deeds 
of individual heroes, statesmen, and law-givers. These 
latter histories were, when formed into national historical 
records, always prefaced by a summary of the previous 
mythic narratives which were more often than not mani- 
pulated and distorted from their original form by the 
authors of what may be called the Individualist School of 



x Preface. 

History. These legends were, down to the days of Niebuhr 
and the introduction of the study of Comparative Philology 
and Mythology, generally believed to be based, as averred 
by those who cited them, on the biographies of individuals. 
Since this new school of investigators has proved that the 
heroes of the Mythic Age were not living men like the 
leading actors in modern histories, it has come to be an 
almost universally accepted article of faith among those who 
try to portray the history of the remote past that the primi- 
tive myths of what is called the Prehistoric Age must be 
looked on as inventions of later times mixed with small 
fragments of genuine ancient tradition. Though no one 
explains why men should have wasted time in their manu- 
facture if they were useless lies, or how, if they were made 
up by modern authors to suit the appetite for local history 
in each place, they should everywhere show traces of being 
derived from some central and often far-distant source. 

The real truth is that these myths in their original form 
are surviving relics of the genuine ancient history of the 
earliest ages of human culture. One of my principal aims 
in writing this book and my previous work, the Ruling 
Races of Prehistoric Times, is to show that the opinion as 
to the recent origin and unreliability of Mythic History is 
erroneous, and to prove that our wise forefathers, whose 
initiative ability, perseverance, and foresight laid the foun- 
dations of our civilisation and knowledge, framed these tales 
with the object of handing down to their successors a true 
account of the national progress of the nations they 
ruled. I also hope to prove that we have misunderstood 
the true meaning of the histories they have bequeathed to 
us, and that our failure to comprehend the purport of the 
information they meant to convey arises from our ignorance 
of the true method of interpreting their utterances, which 
were all prepared under rules which I have tried to set 
forth in my analysis of their contents, but which were 
ignored and forgotten by the writers of Individualistic 
History. 



Preface. xi' 

The rules of interpretation, which give a clue to the true 
meaning of these histories, were during the Myth-making Age 
carefully taught to each rising generation by the national 
teachers, and the oblivion into which they fell is one of the 
great misfortunes inflicted on posterity by the Gotho-Celtic 
invaders from the North, who are now called Aryans. They, 
whose chroniclers were the family and tribal bards who 
celebrated the prowess of their foremost soldiers, broke up, 
as I show in Chapter IX., the organisation of the com- 
munities of agriculturists, artisans* mariners and traders, who 
ruled Southern Asia and Europe, and introduced the epoch 
of military conquests made by nations whose leaders were 
ambitious warriors, who sought to substitute their own 
despotic personal rule and that of their heirs for that of the 
previous kings, who governed as the heads of the hierarchy 
of the national councils of provinces, towns and villages 
confederated under the constitutional customs I have here 
Sketched. 

In beginning the elucidation of the historical riddles of 
civilisation, and the translation into forms intelligible to 
modern minds of the actual thoughts of the primitive races, 
we must first go down to the root-germ whence national life 
began to grow, and start our survey from the primary 
sources indicated by the laws of human progress. These 
tell us that the first birth process in the creation of national 
life is the formation of associated groups of human beings 
united as the members of a permanent village community, ^n 
a family, or a tribe. It was in the South, as I have shown 
in the Riding Races of Preliistoric IWiSV, and as I prove 
more fully in the following pages, that the first village com- 
munities and the provincial governments originating from 
them were founded by the forest races of Southern India 
and the Indian Archipelago, and it was in the North that 
the family expanded into the tribe. Neither the village 
communities of the South nor the tribes of the North were 
able to exist as permanent units holding a definite place 
of their own, or to work their way forward on the paths of 



xii Preface. 

social advance till they had framed laws binding society 
together, a history of their past career, and a national religion. 
The two first preserved them from internal dissensions and 
showed the pitfalls to be avoided by those who would reach 
the goal as winners, while the third in its initial stages was 
in the belief of its expounders the animating soul of patriotic 
life, which alone saved the land whence they drew their 
subsistence from being withered and depopulated by drought, 
famine and pestilence. For it taught that the primary 
"religio" or binding duty of each community was to secure 
the favour and protection of the unseen powers who ordained 
the succession of night and day, seed time and harvest, and 
of the recurring seasons of the year, and who punished the 
neglect or infraction of their laws by disease, social ruin, and 
death. 

Hence one of the first tasks undertaken by each associated 
community was that of ascertaining the order and approxi- 
mate dates when the seasons followed each other, so that 
they might be able to begin each season with the ordained 
propitiatory ceremonies. Consequently the supreme national 
God of the earliest organisers of society was the Maker and 
Measurer of time, the God who imparted the knowledge of 
its sequence to the animals pursued by the hunting races, 
who gave life, with its accompanying seasonal changes, to 
the trees and plants, and fitted the earth to receive the seeds 
sown, and to grow and ripen the crops reaped by the tillers 
of the soil. He was the Being by whose ordeirs the sun, 
moon and stars rose and set, and went daily round the Pole ; 
and the rules of the ritual of the worship of this Creator of 
time, and the life to which it gave birth, were preserved 
together with their other distinctive national customs as the 
most precious of their protecting observances by every 
section of the original social units, which emigrated to other 
lands as offshoots from the parent stems. 

The Pole Star in the North and the central starless void 
in the South, round which the heavenly bodies revolved, 
were in the eyes of these primitive pioneers the dwelling- 



Preface. xiii 

places of the parent-creating power, the soul of the ever- 
engendering germ of life, the Tao or creating year-path 
of the Chinese, as conceived in the creed of the theology 
sketched in Chapter VII. p. 479. This is the year-god 
called in Greek mythology, as will be shown in the course 
of this work, Odusseus, the God of the Path (686s) of Time, 
whose wife was the weaver of its web (77-77V97), the goddess 
Penelope, who was in heaven the goddess of the Pleiades, 
called i n Indi a the Krittakas or Spinners, and her husband 
was the year-star Orion, who, as I show in Chapter III., 
>1/<ia succeeded in primitive astronomy Canopus as the leader of 
the stars, headed by the Pleiades, round the Pole. He was 
the Orwandil or Orendel of the Northern historical legends, 
whose toe was the star Rigel in Orion, and the story of 
whose voyage in seventy-two ships, the seventy-two five-day 
weeks of the year, to find his bride Brigit, the Sanskrit 
goddess Brihati, is told in Chapter II. pp. 64, 65. The seed 
germ engendered by this dual but united heavenly and sex- 
less parent-god, who was the mother and father of life, came -. 
down to earth in the rain and engendered the mother-tree, // 
which grew, according to the belief I have described in 
Chapter II., in the mud of the Southern Ocean. The rain- 
germ ascended through its trunk and branches as the creating- 
sap whence the seed of life was born, and this seed in the 
indigenous Southern worship of the rice as the plant or tree 
of life was the rice soul which, as explained in Chapter IV. 
p. 139, note 3, was believed to impart its life to its con- 
sumers. 

The God who disseminated the life-giving rain at the 
fitting times was the being whose favour was to be propi- 
tiated at the festivals held at the beginning of each recurring 
season of the year, which was, as I show, reckoned by 
different rules in different parts of the world, and at different 
successive periods of time. It is the history of the various 
and consecutive series of year-reckonings calculated by the 
dominant races, who ruled the growing world, in their 
attempts to learn the laws of time measurement, which is the 
principal subject dealt with in this book. 



xiv Preface. 

The first of these years was that measured by the founders 
of permanent villages, who began their year when the Pleiades 
first set after the sun on the ist of November. This was 
chosen by them as their New Year's Day, because it marked 
the beginning of Spring in that region of the Southern and 
Northern hemispheres which lay close to the Equator, and 
of which Ceylon, called Lanka, was the centre. This central 
island was in Hindu mythological astronomy the land ruled 
by Agastya, the star Canopus, which, as the brightest of the 
revolving stars near the Pole of the Southern heavens, was 
looked on as * the king of antarctic polar space. It was 
believed to lead the Pleiades and the starry host, their 
attendant followers, round the Pole; and in this daily and 
annual circuit the Pleiades set before the sun during the six 
months from the ist of May till the 31st of October, and 
began on the ist of November to set for the next six months 
after the sun. 

The year thus measured was not reckoned by months, 
which were as yet unknown, but by nights and weeks of 
five days, the number of the fingers of the creating hand. 
Thirty-six weeks covered each of the periods between Novem- 
ber and May, and May and November, so that the whole 
year was one of seventy-two weeks or three hundred and 
sixty days. This year, which was that reckoned by the 
Celtic Druids, as well as by the earliest founders of Indian 
villages, began with a three days' feast to the dead, which 
survives in our All Hallow Eve, All Saints' and All Souls' 
Days, also with the election of village officers, a custom 
still preserved in the election on the ist of November of 
English Mayors and Aldermen. It was, as I show in Chapter 
II., once the official year throughout South-western Asia and 
Europe, and became in Ireland the year of Bran, meaning the 
Raven, who had been in the South the raven-star Canopus, 
and of the two Brigits, daughters of Dagda, the Indian 
Daksha, the god of the showing {dak) hand, the Celtic forms 
of the Sanskrit Brihati, who is, in the ritual of the Indian 
Brahmanas, the goddess of the thirty-six five-day weeks of 
each of the two halves of the Pleiades year. 



Preface. xv 

The revolution of the heavenly bodies by which our fore- 
fathers measured this and the other years they reckoned, was 
thought to be caused by thewinds^.and their visible leader 
was the black-cloud, the 5irTKhiT I of the Akkadians and 
Egyptians, which became the divine raven. This bird, the 
bearer of the creating rain, was in the early genealogies, 
which traced the national descent to the seed of life it 
brought, the parent of the Indian trading races, who used 
sibilants as representing Northern gutturals. Perhaps the 
interchange was one made by both races, the Northern 
changing an original Southern sibilant into a guttural, and 
calling the Southern cloud-bird Shu, Khu, or the Southerners 
may have reversed the order and changed the Northern Khu 
into Shu. At any rate it was as the reputed sons of the 
cloud-bird that the Indian traders called themselves Saus 
or sons of Shu. This name was changed by the Sumerians 
of the Euphratean Delta into Zu, the storm-bird, who stole 
the " tablets of Bel 2 ," and he became, in Egypt, Dhu-ti, the 
bird (d/iu) of life {ti), the god we call Thoth, who had a 
bird's head and a bird's feather, the recording pen of the 
time chronicler, in his hand. 

The time-measuring winds of early astronomy were those 
of the South-west and North-east Monsoons, which bring 
the regularly recurring periodical rains to the tropical equa- 
torial lands at the ordained seasons. They drove Agastya, 
the star Canopus, the pilot of the constellation Argo, the 
mother-ship of heaven, the Akkadian Ma and the Pleiades, 
with their following stars, round the Pole, and distributed 
the seasonal rains over that region of the earth on the shores 
of the Indian Ocean which was the cradle of infant civilised 
humanity. 

During the first period of my historical^survey, the age 
of Pole Star worship, the eartlrTvas thought to be a station- 

JfrcU *^~ . 

1 Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary, Sign 73. Khu is the Egyptian word/ 
represented by the hieroglyph of the bird. 

2 Ibid., Hibbcrt Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 297. 



xvi Preface. 

j L ary oval plain, resting on the mud of the Southern Ocean, 
whence the world's mother-tree was born from the seed 
brought by the rain-cloud-bird, the offspring of the Cauldron 
of Life, the creating-waters stored by the Pole Star god as 
the Holy Grail or Blood of God, and guarded by his raven 
vice-gerent, the god whose Celtic name is Bran, in the 
watch-tower called the Caer Sidi or Turning Tower of the 
heavens I . 

The Tree of Life grew up from its roots fixed in the 
Southern mud through the superincumbent soil, and appeared 
on earth as the central tree of the village grove growing 

-in the centre of the world's central village, just as the group 
of forest-trees left standing in the centre of the cleared land ■ 
was the midmost home of the parent -tree-gods of all villages 
founded by the Indian Jorjgsl-races. r ^- / ' 

In the next age of Lunar-Solar worship a different cos- 
mogony was developed. In this the world was looked on as 
an egg laid by the great cloud-bird, which had been the 
monsoon raven-bird, which was now believed to dwell in 
the Pole Star. This was the bird called by the Arabs the; 
Rukh, the bird of the breath {ruakh) of God, the Persian 
Simurgh or Sin-murgh, the moon {sin) bird {murgh), the 
Garutmat of the Rigveda, which dwells in the highest heavens, 
its Pole Star home, and begets the sun 2 . This egg became 
in Hindu historical mythology, as told in Chapter VI. p. 310, 
that laid by Gan-dhan, the Star Vega in Lyra, the Pole 
Star from about 10,000 to 8000 B.C., from which were born 
the hundred Kauravyas, sons of the world's tortoise (kur), 
the oval earth, and this was a reproduction of an earlier birth- 
story, telling of the birth of the Satavaesa, or hundred {scttd) 
creators (vacsa) of the Zendavesta, from the mother constel- 
lation Argo, the Akkadian Ma, meaning also the ship. 

This egg was, in popular belief, divided into a Northern 



1 Rhys, The Arthurian Legend ', chap, xiii., 'The Origin of the Holy Grail, 
pp. 300—314 

2 Rg. i. 164, 46, x. 149, 3. 



Preface. xvii 

and Southern half, the large and small ends of the egg 
surrounded in the centre by the ocean-snake, on whose 
waters it rested. In the centre of the Northern or larsre 

o 

half of Gan-dhari's egg, ruled by her Kauravya sons, was 
their Indian land called Kuru-kshetra, or field [kshetra) of 
the Kurus, where the world's tree, the parent Banyan fig- 
tree {Ficus Indicd), emerged. It had its roots in the Southern 
mud, as explained in Chapter II. p. 26, and on its top sat 
the parent-ape, whose thigh was the constellation of the 
Great Bear. This ape, in the first conception entertained 
of his functions, performed the part assigned to the winds 
in the first cosmogony, and turned the stars round the Pole 
with his mighty five-fingered hand, the five days of the week. 
But in a further development of the belief in the ape as the 
God crowned by the Pole Star, whose thigh was the Great 
Bear, he was thought to turn the tree and the star-flowers on 
its branches by the pressure of the Thigh Stars. 

The Southern small end of the egg penetrated below the 
waters guarded by the encircling ocean-snake to the mud 
whence the mother-tree grew, and the men of the Southern 
mountain-land, emerging from the ocean, were in ancient 
belief the race called by the Celts Fo-mori, or men beneath 
(fo) the sea (inuir), the dwellers in the land lighted by 
the Southern sun of winter, the sea-born race of the primi- 
tive historical mythology preserved in the Arabian Nights. 

This cosmogony was developed by the mixed races formed 
by the union in Euphratean lands of the emigrating descen- 
dants of the first founders of Indian villages with the Northern 
Ugro-Finn races. These Finns traced their descent to the 
egg laid by Ukko, the storm-bird, who became in Indian 
history Kansa, the moon-goose (kans), son of Ugra-sena, 
the king of the army {sena) of the Ugras or Ogres, the Ugur- 
Finns whose story is told in Chapter VI. In this cosmogony 
of the floating egg the regularity of the annual course of the 
moon and sun through the stars was thought to be preserved 
by the watching-god, the boundary [laksh) snake-god, the 
Gond Goraya, and the god Lakshman of the story of Rama, 

b 



xviii Preface. 

as told on p. 208. He determined the direction in which the 
stars should be turned by the ape, so as to make the track 
of Sita, the furrow Rama's plough driven with the ecliptic 
path of the moon and sun, uniform in all the revolutions 
of the heavens round the egg. 

It was during this age that the reckoning of time by the 
presence of the sun in the zodiacal stars of the Nag-kshetra, 
or field of the Naga snakes, first began. The evidence I have 
been able to collect as to its date seems, as I have pointed 
out in Chapter V. Section A., On the Birth of the Sun-god 
dated by Zodiacal stars, pp. 205 ff., to show that the first 
year thus reckoned was one of which the beginning was 
fixed by the entry of the sun into Aries at the Autumnal 
Equinox. According to other recorded positions of the sun 
in that year it was in Cancer at the winter solstice when 
Rama was installed as ruler of the Indian year of the three- 
years cycle. 

This three-years cycle-year was begun in Syria at the 
Autumnal Equinox with the entry of the sun into Aries, 
and this New Year's Day still survives in that of the Jews, 
who open it with blasts on ram-horn trumpets. This was, 
as I show in note 1, p. 208, probably that reckoned by the early 
Zend fire-worshippers who founded the rule of the Kushika 
kings. The Indian evidence on the other hand, as I show 
on pp. 207, 208, and the Malay traditions referred to in note 
3, p. 207, date back to a time when the year of Rama began, 
when the sun was in Cancer at the winter solstice. But the 
framers of this year, with true Indian conservatism, preserved 
the memory of the reckoning of Orion's year, and also that 
of the sun-bird beginning at the winter solstice, as shown 
on p. 22, for in preparing their list of zodiacal Nag-kshetra 
stars of the year beginning with the Autumnal Equinox, 
they placed /3 Arietis as the first star in it. The list closes 
with Revati £ Piscium, the star marking the close of the 
month Bhadrapada (August — September). It then, as I show 
on p. 209, ushered in the New Year of the sun-ram of the 
Autumnal Equinox. He was the god born from the tree 



Preface. xix 

of the fish-mother-star, worshipped throughout South-western 
Asia as the Akkadian goddess Nana, the Syrian Atergatis, 
Derceto, and Tirhatha, whose memory is preserved in the 
constellations Pisces, the Dolphin, and, as I show in 
Appendix C, of Cetus the Whale. She was, as I prove 
on pp. 230, 231, the traditional mother of Shem-i-ramot, 
the bisexual goddess of the three-years cycle-year. The 
year thus reckoned is one which is shown by the position 
of the sun in Aries at the Autumnal Equinox (September — 
October), in Cancer at the winter solstice (December — 
January), and in Pisces (August — September), to date from 
between 14,000 and 15,000 B.C. The evidence as to its 
use proves that it was the year reckoned by the priestly 
astronomers who determined the dates of the annual festivals 
throughout India, the Malayan countries and South-western 
Asia, whence it was carried to Western Europe, as is shown 
by the Breton stone calendars described in pp. 266 — 269. 
The zodiacal reckoning of time thus begun, was, as I show 
from the recorded dates, determined by the position of the 
sun in zodiacal stars, regularly continued throughout the 
whole of the remaining epochs of the Myth-making Age, 
including those of the years of eleven and fifteen months, 
and the subsequent year-reckonings up to the time when 
the sun was in Taurus at the Vernal Equinox. 

The conception of the earth as a stationary floating-egg was 
followed by one which pictured it as turning on its axis, and 
thus reversed the doctrine of the revolving heavenly bodies. 
This change originated in the brains of the Northern worship- 
pers of the household-fire, and was developed when built 
houses began to supersede the caves, rock-shelters, and rude 
huts made of branches of trees stuck in the ground, which 
were the dwelling-places of the primitive agricultural and 
hunting races. These human beavers, sons of the Twins 
Night and Day, called by the Greeks Castor, the unsexed 
beaver, and Polu-deukes, the much {polu) wetting [deukes) 
god, were the first users of moistened earth for building, and 
their descendants the first makers of sun-dried bricks, and 

b 2 



xx Preface. 

of pottery made on the potter's wheel. These latter changed 
the polar ape who turned the stars with his hand, and the 
Thigh stars of the Great Bear into the Great Potter, the 
wise-ape Kabir, the Northern form of the Dravidian ape 
Kapi. In the first form of the theology of the turning-tree, 
which engendered the heat whence life was born as the fire- 
drill breeds fire, the stars turned with it as it was driven 
round, according to Greek belief by Ixion, the Sanskrit 
Akshivan, the man of the axle (aks/ia), who was bound by 
Hermes, the god of the time-recording gnomon-pillar, to the 
stars of the Great Bear. But in its subsequent development 
the stars were, as in the first belief, detached from the tree 
in which the Potter ape sat. They then became the stationary 
lights of heaven, visible through the web of the overarching 
heavens' tent. 

This tent was first the Peplos or bridal-veil given to 
Harmonia as a wedding gift by her husband Kadmus, the 
man of the East (kedem), and the arranger (kad, root of /cd^co, 
to arrange). She was the goddess called in Syriac or 
Aramaic Kharmano, the Chaldaic Kharman, meaning the 
snake which encircled as its guardian mother-ring of tilled 
land the primaeval village grove, and hence the dialectic forms 
of her name Harmonia and Sarmo-bel were formed. Sarmo-bel 
is the distinctive name of the Agathodaemon, the good snake 
depicted under the sacred Phoenician sign $?). It indicated 
the path of the sun-bird round the boundary of the heavenly 
village, called in Hindu astronomical mythology the Nag- 
kshetra or field of the Naga race. The boundary stars 
marked the track of the sun-bird of the first solar year of the 
Indian Mundas described in Chapter II. p. 22, which began 
when the sun set in the South-west at the winter solstice. 
This sun-goddess of the flying-snake was the goddess Taut, 
the Phoenician form of the Egyptian Dhu-ti or Thoth, the 
bird (dhu) of life (tz), who was originally the Akkadian 
Dumu-zi, the son {dumu) of life (zz), the star Orion, which 
succeeded Canopus as the leader of the stars round the Pole 
when the latter Southern star became invisible to the 



Preface. xxi 

Indian emigrant farmers who had reached Asia Minor as 
the Rephaim or sons of the Giant (repha) star Canopus. 

This name Tut also appears in that of the Roman god 
Tut-anus, in the title Tuticus, meaning supreme, given to 
the Oscan chief-magistrate Meddix-tuticus, and also in the 
Tut-ulus or conically dressed hair worn by the Roman 
Flamines or fire-priests, as a type of the heavenly veil 
concealing the hidden creating thought in the divine brain. 

This veil was, according to Pherecydes of Syros, who 
wrote about 600 B.C., thrown by Zeus over the winged oak, 
the revolving-world's tree, the parent-oak of the Lapps, 
Esthonians, and Druids x . On this veil were depicted the 
stars, or rather they were seen through it. Zeus also gave 
it to Europa, the goddess of the West (ereb), the sister of 
Kadmus, and she is represented on the coins of Gortyna in 
Crete as sitting in the branches of the parent-oak-tree with 
the veil over her head 2 . 

This goddess of the veil was also called Khusartis, from 
Khurs, a circle, and was personified in her male form, that 
of her husband Kadmus, the arranger, as the dwarf Kabir, 
Chrysor, or Khrusor, the circle-maker and ordainer, who, as 
the creating-wise-ape, the smith, put all things in circular 
order. She was also named Thuroh the Law, the Hebrew 
Thorah, of which Doto, named by Horn. II. lxviii. 43, among 
the Nereids, is an Aramaic form ; and the bridal-veil of 
Harmonia, as the goddess Doto, is said by Pausanias II. 1, 7, 
to be preserved at Gabala, a Syrian seaport bearing the name 
of Gi-bil or Bil-gi, the Akkadian fire-god who produced the 
creating-fire by the revolving fire-drill, the world's tree 3. 

In the house or tent roofed by the over-arching veil of the 
firmament the mother-goddess, looked on in one aspect as 
the guardian-snake, and in another as the flying sun-bird 

1 O'Neill, Night of the Gods, Wearing the Veil, vol. ii. p. 877. 

2 Ibid., Axis Myths, vol. i. p. 308; Lenormant, Origine de V Histoire, i. 
PP- 95i 568, 569, 573 ; Goblet d'Alviella, Migration of Symbols, p. 168 note. 

3 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xiii. pp. 504 — 507, chap. iii. p. 103, 
chap. xiii. p. 658 ; O'Neill, Night of the Gods, Polar Myths, vol. i. p. 316 



xxii Preface. 

measuring the year, was, like the Finn house-mother, the 
guardian of the Joula or never-extinguished fire of the house 
kindled by the revolving-stem of the world's tree. Also it 
was under this roof that her mate, the fabricating Master 
Smith and the Master Potter of the turning Great Bear 
Constellation, pursued his creating trade. 

In the evolution of belief the trunk of the world's tree, with 
its three roots penetrating, like those of the parent-ash- tree 
the Ygg-drasil of the Edda I , to the Urdar fountain of the 
circling waters of the South, became the Trident or Trisula 
worshipped by the Takkas of India, as described in Chapter 
IV. p. 175. This, which symbolised successively the three 
seasons of Orion's year and the three years of the cycle-year, 
was the creating-weapon of the Greek god Poseidon and of 
the Japanese twin-creators, Izanagi and Izanami, by which 
they raised the land from the sea as butter is raised from the 
churned milk. 

It was by the revolutions of this trident of Creating Time 
that the Indian creator Vasuki raised the Indian land of the 
Kushikas with its central mountain Mandara, meaning the 
Revolving (maud) hill which emerged from the surrounding 
ocean as the clay cone rising from the potter's wheel, and 
brought up with it the Tortoise-land, the Indian continental 
area, the appanage of the Kauravyas or Kushikas, the sons 
of Kur and Kush the tortoise, and of Kaus the bow. 

This mother-mountain raised under the heavenly veil is, 
in another form of the myth, the central mountain of the 
Himalayas, the crowning summit of the Pamir plateau, the 
Hindu Mount Meru. In the primitive form of the Akkadian 
and Kushika birth story it was the Western peak of this 
plateau, called by the Akkadians Khar-sak-kurra, meaning 
" the wet (sak) entrails (Mar) of the mountain of the East " 
(kurra), or "the chief (sak) ox (khar) of the East (hurra)*." 



1 Mallet, Northern Antiquities, Bohn's Edition, The Prose Edda, 15, 16, 
pp. 410—413. 

2 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 143, note 4; 



Preface. xxiii 

It was from this mountain that the parent-river of the 
Kushikas, the Haetumant of the Zendavesta, the modern 
Helmend, descended to the Lake Kashava or Zarah in 
Seistan ; and, in the reeds of this lake, Kavad, the infant- 
parent of the Kavi or Kabir Kush kings, was found by 
Uzava, the goat-god Uz, called Tum-aspa, the horse of 
darkness. He was, as I show in Chapter IV. pp. 141, 142, 
the Pole Star goat ruling the year of three seasons 1 . 

But this mother-mountain of the Akkadians and Kuskikas 
was not the first of the national parent-mountains worshipped 
by the Gonds of India and the Kurd sons of Mount Ararat, 
for all these legends can be traced back to the pregnant 
mother-mountain of the Northern Finns, round which the 
hunter-star drove the reindeer-sun-god, who, as described 
in Chapter III. p. 89, was slain at the close of his year at the 
winter solstice. 

In the form of this historical legend telling of the rising 
of Mount Mandara, we are told in the Mahabharata that 
there rose with it and its fringe of continental land the sun- 
ass, or horse, who] took the place of the reindeer sun-god of 
the North and of both the Southern cloud-bird Khu and the 
sun-hen flying round the heavens. All these, instead of re- 
maining stationary like the stars seen through the veil, 
within which Mount Mandara revolved, circled it, and the 
revolving world it took round with it like the rain-shedding 
cloud, which, in the original form of the myth of the sun- 
year, drew the cloud chariot of the female and male Twins 
Night and Day in which they bore the sun-maiden. This 
horse, called in the Mahabharata Ucchaishravas, the ass 
with the long ears, is that called in the Rigveda Trikshi 
and Tarkshya, the horse of the Nahusha sons of the Ocean- 
snake and of the revolving Great-Bear constellation [Nagur 

Lenormant, Chaldcean Magic, pp. 302, 30S, 169 ; Sayce, Assyrian Grammar 
Syllabary, No. 399. 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p 145 ; Dar- 
mesteter, Zendavesta Zamydd Yasht, x. 66, Farvardin Yasht, 131 ; S.B. E., 
vol. xxiii. pp. 302, 221 ; West, Bundahish, xxxi. 23; S.B. E., vol. v. p. 136. 



xxiv Preface. 

Nahur). This horse, under the name Tarkshya, meaning 
the son of Trikshi, is called Arishta-nemi, the ass of the un- 
broken [arishta) wheel (nemz), in Rg. x. 178, 1, the name given, 
as I show in Chapter VI. p. 316, to the horse's head, the year- 
god of the eleven-months year 1 . This last god, whose 
genealogy shows him to be the son or successor of the 
ass sun-god of the three-years cycle, was born, as I there 
show, under the star Spica a Virgo, the mother of corn, 
the Eygptian Min, the mother-star of the Minyan race. The 
birth took place when the sun was in Virgo at the Vernal 
Equinox, that is between 13,000 and 12,000 B.C., or about 
2000 years after the age of the long-eared sun-ass when 
the sun was in Aries at the Autumnal Equinox. 

This primaeval ass, the Vedic year-god Trikshi, who is 
said in Rg. viii. 22, 7 to traverse the holy road of the 
divine order, or the path of the god of annual time, was 
the god of the boring {tri) people, the bee-inspired race 
of Chapter IV. p. 169, and hence the year-god of the Greek 
Telchines of Rhodes and Lycia, whose name substituting / 
for r, and a guttural for a sibilant, reproduces that of the 
Vedic god Trikshi whose sons they were. They, like their 
Indian prototypes, the Takkas, were deft artificers, the 
first workers in metal, who introduced bronze and made 
the lunar sickle of Kronos, that of the Indian Srinjaya 
or men of the sickle (srini), the sons of the corn-mother 
Virgo, and the creating trident of Poseidon. This latter 
god was nurtured by them with a nymph, the daughter 
of ocean Kapheira, the Semitic Kabirah, the Arabic Khabar, 
the goddess-mother of the Kabiri and another form of Har- 
monia, mother of the sons of the smith of heaven. 
She was also the black Demeter of Phigalia, the goddess 
with the horse's head 2 , who was violated by Poseidon, who 
was, as I show in Chapter IV. p. 143, originally the snake 
parent-god Erectheus or Ericthonius, from whose three 
thousand mares the North-wind god. Boreas begot, accord - 

1 Mahabharata Adi {Astika) Parva, xvii. p. 78 ; Rg. viii. 22, 7, vi. 46, 7, 8, 9. 

2 Frazer, Pauscmias, viii. 42, I — 3, vol. i. p. 428. 



Preface. xxv 

ing to Horn. II. xx. 220 — 225, the twelve horses of the year. 
Hence Poseidon, the god nurtured by the Telchines, was 
the snake-father of the horses of the sun, two of which 
he gave to Peleus, the god of the Potter's clay (7rr)\6s), 
the Great Potter and the father of Achilles 1 ; and the 
Telchines his votaries, who were first sons of the sun-ass 
Trikshi, became by their union with the northern sons 
of the sun-horse the ruling artisan race of the year of 
eleven months of the god called Tarkshya, the son of Trikshi, 
and also Arishta-nemi or the god of the unbroken wheel. 
We can thus by their genealogy trace their traditional • 
history from between 14,000 and 15,000 B.C., to between 
13,000 and 12,000 B.C. These priests were the Kuretes ' 
whose religious dances were circular gyrations like those 
of the heavenly bodies round the pole 2 . 

In these cosmogonies we see specimens of the scientific 
and historical myths of the men of the primitive age of 
civilization. They were originally evolved from the dra- 
matic nature-myths, framed for the instruction of the village 
children by the elders of the first village communities, such 
as the story of Nala and Damayanti, telling of the wooing 
and marriage of Nala, meaning the channel (nala) of the 
seasonal rains, the god of the two monsoons with the earth 
that is to be tamed (damayanti). This same use of dramatic 
metaphor which characterised these primitive stories, was 
continued, when histories telling of events spread over 
long ages of time were added to the catalogue of national 
literature. Hence, as I show in Chapter I. p. 10, Chapter 
V. pp. 217, 218, and in the Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, 
Vol. I., Essay II., pp. 64 — 76, the story of Nala and 
Damayanti was expanded into a much more extensive his- 
tory than that contemplated by the first frame rs of the myth, 
for it became the Epic history of the Mahabharata or 

1 Homer, Iliad, xxiii. 277, 278. 

s Smith, Dictionary of Antiquities, vol. iii. p. 987, s.v. , Telchines; O'Neill 
Ni%ht of the Gods, vol. ii. p. 847 ; Berard, Origine des Cnltes Arcadiens, 
pp. 104 — 109, 183. 






xxvi Preface. 

Great Bharatas, the race - begetters ibhri), the people 
formed from the amalgamation of the races who successively 
ruled India down to the close of the Myth-making Age, 
and who called it Bharata-varsha, the land of the Bharatas. 
This covers the whole period reviewed in this work, begin- 
ning even before the first date I have recorded, 21,000 B.C., 
when a Kepheus was the Pole Star. 

During the whole of the three ages of Pole Star, Lunar- 
solar and Sun-worship comprised in this Myth-making 
epoch all ancient histories were framed on similar ground- 
plans to those used by the successive authors of the Mahab- 
harata legends, and were recited to the people at the 
national New Years' festivals, as I show in Chapter VI. pp. 
297, 298. By the rules of their construction, they only 
furnish exact information as to the course of the national 
changes they describe when they are interpreted in the 
sense intended by their authors to be conveyed to those 
for whose use they were intended. These men lived 
in an age when the object of the national historians was 
to record the progress of the .nation or tribe for whose 
benefit they worked, and thus to furnish guide-marks to 
the descendants of each generation, which thus by these 
did bequeath its experiences to its children. For this 
purpose the record of the names of the national leaders 
was in their eyes useless. Hence they substituted for 
the living actors symbolically named persons whose names 
gave a key to the inner meaning of these narratives, and 
these, when they had completed the tasks attributed to 
them in the historic dramas prepared by the national 
historiographers the Prashastri, or teaching and recording 
priests of the Hindus, the Zend Frashaostra who became 
the Jewish scribes and the Greek Exegetae, only lived as 
guides to memory, or were like the heroes of the Mahab- 
harata transferred to heaven as stars. They thus took 
their place in the historical nomenclature of the Constel- 
lations, which, as will be seen in the course of this work, 
tell in their names the history of the world. 



Preface. xxvii 

Seeing that the narrators of these officially prepared 
ancient histories, which were believed to be divinely inspired 
utterances painting in pictorial language the national results 
achieved in the course of ages, always used the names 
of the actors they spoke of as keys to their meaning, 
it is a fatal mistake to regard these embodied symbolical 
sign-marks of the primitive form of history as indicating 
individuals. In these narratives the actual leaders who 
had been honoured, loved and followed during the lifetime 
they had devoted to the service of their country, were only 
remembered after death in the records of the victories 
they had gained over the obstacles raised by ignorance 
and lawless licence, over human foes and climatic impedi- 
ments. This memorial, furnished by the benefits secured 
by their deeds, was the only remembrance they wished 
and sought for, as the end for which they toiled was not 
so much personal aggrandisement as the continued stability 
and improvement of the state fabric they and their fathers 
had reared. This was in their eyes a far more noble 
monument than that of personal praise, and one which 
best repaid their constant devotion to what they had learnt 
to be their highest duty. 

Under this system of oral historical record, in which each 
generation handed down its experiences to its descendants, 
each successive leader became the reproduction of those 
who preceded him in the task of nation-building, or, in 
the words of the Mahabharata, the son was the father reborn 
from the mother-sheath. Thus in religious evolution, as will 
be shown hereafter, each newly deified manifestation of divine 
power became the successor under different names and at- 
tributes of the original creating Spirit-God. This conception 
appears in its most fully developed form in the sequence 
of the births of the Buddha, recorded in the Jatakas or Birth- 
Stories, and partly told in Chapter VII. Section G. In 
these his first embodiment as a God of Time is said by 
himself in Jataka 465 x , to be his birth as the king Sal-tree 

1 Rouse and Francis, The Jatakas, vol. iv. pp. 96 — 98. 



xxviii Preface. 

{Shorea robustd), the mother-tree, from which he was after- 
wards born as the sun-god. This tree was the pillar which 
supported the palace of king Brahmadatta, the ruler, given 
(datta) by the Creator [Brahma). This palace was the 
heavenly vault lit with stars, which I have described above 
as the dome sustained by the world's tree with its roots fixed 
in the mud of the Southern Ocean and its top crowned by 
the Pole Star. 

A variant form of this tree was the Erica-tree supporting 
the palace of the king of Byblos, the modern Ji-bail, the 
Phoenician Gi-bal, the city of the Akkadian fire-god Gi-bil or 
Bil-gi, where, as we have seen above, the Peplos of Harmonia 
was kept. In this tree Isis found the coffin of Osiris, the 
year-god, containing his body, which on her arrival in Egypt 
was cut into fourteen pieces by Set and his seventy-two 
assistants, who changed the year-god of the growing tree 
who had measured the year by seventy-two five-day weeks 
into that of the lunar-solar god who measured his year by 
the fourteen days of the lunar phases z . 

This doctrine of re-birth survived among the poet-bards 
of the Gotho-Celtic Northern sun-worshippers, who initiated 
the new history succeeding that of the Myth-making Age, 
and told of the deeds of individual heroes who were actually 
living men. It was under this influence that they mingled 
with their biographies of famous warrior-kings, such as 
Cyrus, Alexander the Great and Charlemagne, legends taken 
from earlier records, which assigned to them birth-stories 
told originally of their mythic predecessors. Thus they 
made Cyrus the son of the daughter of Astyages, that is 
Azi Dahaka, the biting snake, the Indian Vritra, slain by 
Trita and Thraetaona and other conquering heroes of the 
Rigveda and Zendavesta. Alexander the Great became the 
descendant of Peleus, the Potter-god of the Potter's Clay 
(72-77X09), and of Achilles, the sun-god. And they associated 



1 Frazer, Golden Bough, First Edition, vol. i., chap. iii. pp. 302, 303 ; Hewitt, 
Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 128, 129. 



Preface. xxix 

Charlemagne with the sun-charioteer, the Wain of Karl, the 
Great Bear, and the sun hero Roland. These bards repro- 
duced the old traditional histories in the Sagas of the North, 
and in those on which the Iliad, Odyssey and .Eneid are 
founded ; and all these, like the later Shah Nameh of Persia, 
the much earlier Mahabharata, and the still more primitive 
Gond Song of Lingal, make the sun, moon, star and atmos- 
pheric heroes of the earliest national legends actors in historic 
dramas, which, while purporting to represent comparatively 
recent historical events, really tell those of a very remote past. 
It was the conquering races, whose historians were their 
tribal bards, who, on their amalgamation with their foes, 
instituted the last year dealt with in these Chapters, the 
year of twelve months of thirty days each, divided into 
ten-day weeks, and who built the brick altar of the sun-bird 
rising in the East. The composite theology of this new year 
is described in Chapter IX. 

The histories of the Myth-making Age were, as will be 
seen in the sequel of this work, told in three forms, (i) The 
verbal histories prepared by the official historians of each 
governing state. (2) The pictorial histories told in the 
engraved bas-reliefs and picture Papyri of Egypt, and of the 
Turano-Hittite trading races who drew the rock-picture 
of Iasilikaia, copied on p. 259. This is only one specimen 
form of a large number of similar pictographs ; and this 
pictorial history is told also in symbols, such as those on the 
Breton form of the Hindu Linga altar, described in Chapter V. 
pp. 269 — 272. (3) The histories handed down in the forms 
of the national ritual, such as that told in Chapter V. p. 
205 ff., which recorded by the sacrifice of a ram at the autum- 
nal equinox the first measurement of the year beginning 
when the sun entered Aries on the day after the evening 
sacrifice of the ram, the sun-god of the dying year ; also that 
told in the epitome of national history recorded, as is related 
in Chapter IX., in the ritual of the building of the brick altar 
of the year sun-bird rising in the East at the vernal equinox, 
the crowning manifesto of Indian theology. 



xxx Preface. 

In estimating the value of the historical deductions to 
be drawn from these surviving customs, time-reckonings, 
rituals, histories and religious beliefs, we must never forget 
that they must be looked on as signs proving each race who 
adopted them to be distinct from its neighbours, whose 
customs differed from theirs. Each stock which became a 
separate nation had its own special customs, traditions and 
religion, and these were the birth-marks and national trea- 
sures which each emigrating section took with them to other 
lands from their parent home. 

I have traced the course of some of these emigrations, 
beginning with the most historically important of them all, 
that in which the descendants of the first founders of Indian 
villages made their way in canoes hollowed out of forest 
trees, grown on the wooded coasts of Western India, to the 
then barren shores of the Persian Gulf on which no ship- 
building timber has ever grown. In these lands, and others 
to which they subsequently penetrated, the early wanderers 
found large tracts of vacant space wherever they settled, and 
thus all countries in which they found unoccupied territories 
possessing favourable soil and climate, were studded with 
groups of settlers, each differing from its neighbours in 
customs, history, the symbolism of religious belief and 
ritual, and each measuring time after its own fashion. Each 
group carried with it its own religion for the personal use 
of its members, and looked on the abandonment of its 
tenets, or the attempt to bring over proselytes from other 
groups, as gross impieties. Even the conception of apostacy 
of this kind never entered into the minds of the first founders 
of society, who looked on the religion professed by each 
group as one which must inevitably be that of every affiliated 
member. Hence any one passing through the territories 
thus peopled in the early ages, before tribal wars had pro- 
moted distrust, and caused the national customs to be con- 
cealed from strangers under a veil of secrecy, would on moving 
from one group to another find himself to be traversing 
a series of states varying from each other like the different 



Preface. xxxi 

patterns of a kaleidescope, but possessing fundamental simi- 
larities under their apparent differences. These customs 
were all most carefully preserved under the influence of 
the intense national conservatism which is the most marked 
characteristic of the human race. It is owing to this that 
even now, after the lapse of thousands of years disseminating 
their obliterating influences, there are still, as in the primitive 
era, affinities to be found between those who have travelled 
over and settled in regions of the earth's surface very distant 
from each other, and disparities between those who live near 
together. 

Hence under these distributions of the population the 
numerous tribes recorded by ancient writers as dwelling 
in each of the countries of South-eastern Asia and Europe 
must be looked on as grouping together, under each tribal 
name, persons and families whose ancestors had formed their 
separate unions in a very remote past, while many, if not 
most, of the groups traced their descent from a distant centre 
of origin. It is this persistent preservation of the tribal 
ritual and history which explains the close likeness between 
Celtic mythology and that of Southern India, which I have 
shown to be revealed to us by the study of the year-reckon- 
ings, and the ritual of the Druids. These latter were the 
priests of the Fomori or men beneath (fo) the sea {inuir) and 
the Tuatha de Danann, sons of the goddess Danu, the 
descendants of emigrants who had, in the course of ages, made 
their way from the Southern~Tands of the Indian Archipelago, 
those of the Southern end of the world's egg, of which the 
Kauravya plain of Northern India was the top. They 
preserved in Ireland, Britain and Gaul the ancient beliefs 
of the Indian Danava, sons of Danu, the mother-goddess 
worshipped by the Druids. 

Each of these national units believed it to be its chief duty 
to maintain intact the historical customs and religion of their 
forefathers, and to measure time as they did ; but though 
they occasionally naturalised members of other groups, yet 
the naturalised man had to abandon all links of association 



xxxii Preface. 

with his ancient relatives, unless they or a large body of 
them joined him in forming a new group with an offshoot 
from another tribal centre. This incorporated the customs 
of both sections in an altered form, making a new code 
adopted by the united confederates. Hence it is that we find 
the root-forms whence society grew, and the folk-tales record- 
ing primitive beliefs universally distributed, and it was, as 
a consequence of this patriotic dissemination of national 
relics to all quarters of the compass, that I myself have 
heard the same fairy stories told to me in my youth in 
Ireland, repeated by a naked wild Gond at the sources of the 
Mahanadi in India, who had never seen a white man before, 
and whose country, though not far separated from more 
advanced districts, was practically so isolated that the people 
knew of no currency except cowrie-shells, and I had to take 
them with me when I visited their forests. 

During the first ages when the world was peopled by 
agricultural, hunting and fishing races, the separate con- 
federacies into which they were divided generally lived at 
peace with each other, for war, except in the form of petty 
quarrels about boundaries, was almost unknown. All people 
alike lived on the fruit of their exertions, and none of them 
had any surplus wealth to excite the cupidity of their neigh- 
bours. Their only possessions were the soil and its produce, 
the articles they made from stone, earth, wood, and animals' 
bones, and certain minerals and shells they valued as orna- 
ments. As crops were only grown for home consumption, 
the forcible robbery of the crops of prosperous neighbours 
only led to the starvation, retaliation or emigration of the 
victims, and left no future prey for the robbers. Hence this 
form of predatory warfare never became general among 
agricultural communities, and as military prowess had not 
yet become an avenue to personal distinction, the raids 
for heads and scalps made by savage tribes of the later 
fighting races had not yet begun to disturb the public peace. 
Wars of the predatory type first appear among the pastoral 
races, who frequently, when their flocks and herds were 



Preface. xxxiii 

decimated by drought or murrain, replenished their ex- 
hausted stocks by seizing on the nearest herds which had 
not suffered from the same evils. 

It was not till the invasion of the savage sheep and cow- 
feeding races of the North, who introduced human sacrifices 
and the three-years cycle-year described in Chapter V., that 
wars of conquest became frequent. But these were not like 
the later wars of the races who introduced the present form 
of history, accompanied by the enslavement of the subdued 
population. The introduction of these wars is marked by 
the grouping of the frontier provinces occupied by the de- 
fending corps of the national army round the central 
province occupied by the king, as described in pp. 192 — 194. 
These Northern invading races, like the agricultural com- 
munities of the South, looked on the unseen power who 
measured time by the returning seasons of the year as the 
Creating-god. But they depicted this being not as the soul 
of the mother-tree or plant, but as the invisible parent of 
animal life dwelling in the divinely impregnated parent- 
blood, who sent on earth as his symbol the reindeer, who 
marked the changes of the year by dropping his horns in 
autumn, and by their re-growth in spring. This deer-sun- 
god of the hunting races was succeeded by the eel-god of 
the uruted_Jiit»ters and agriculturists, who called themselves 
in Asia Minor and Europe the Iberians, that is the Ibai-erri 
or people (erri) of the rivers (Ibai), the Iravata of India, sons 
of the eel-mountain-goddess Ida, Ira or Ila. They measured 
their year by the migration of the eels to the sea in autumn 
and their return in spring, as described in Chapter IV. Their 
confederacy was that of the Northern hunters united with 
the Southern Indian farmers, who called the Iberian mother- 
mountain Ararat their mother, and they became in Europe 
the Basques or sons of the forest {baso), who first brought 
wheat and barley thither, and founded there on Indian models 
the villages of the Neolithic Age. In India they were the 
worshippers of the forest creating-god Vasu orVasuki, called 
also Lingal by the Kushika Gonds, who came down as the 

c 



xxxiv Preface. 

first swarm of the sons of the mother-mountain, and in- 
troduced there the Sesame oil-seeds which they brought 
from Asia Minor, and furnished the first holy oil which has 
since played such an important part in early medicine and 
religious ritual. They also introduced the millets of the 
sacred oil-land, and were afterwards followed by the barley- 
growing tribes in the order described in Chapters III. 
and IV. 

These first Northern immigrants into India formed by 
their union with the previously settled Finn Dravido Munda 
races the confederacy of the Khati or Hittites, meaning the 
joined races of the North and South, sons of, the Twin gods 
Night and Day, who, when transformed into the zodiacal 
stars Gemini, became the gateposts of the Garden of God, 
through which the sun entered on his annual circuit in the 
years of fifteen and thirteen months, described in Chapters 
VII. and VIII. These latter years were those of the white 
horse of the sun, the Northern sun-god who succeeded the 
sun-deer and the sun-ass, and the black horse whose head 
ruled the year of eleven months of Chapter VI. It was 
under the auspices of the white sun-horse that the systems 
of solar worship were developed. 

It was from the intercourse of the originally alien Northern 
and Southern races that the changing confederacies described 
in this book were developed, and each of those which 
attained supreme power introduced a new method of measur- 
ing time, and a fresh series of festivals of the creating 
year-gods. These festivals still survive in Saints' Days, and 
have left their footprints in all those modern calendars 
which still reveal to those who have learnt the sequence of 
the successive year-reckonings the order of the succession 
of acts unfolding the evolution of the drama of human 
progress. They thus exhibit to us the stages of the pro- 
duction of the final outcome of the Myth-making Age, the 
foundation of the states ruled by the race of skilled farmers, 
artisans, mariners and traders, who covered Southern Asia, 
North Africa and Europe with the commercial communities 



Preface. xxxv 

founded first by the people called the Minyans, the sons 
of Min, the star Spica Virgo, the corn-mother, who in their 
ultimate .development were the Yadu-Turvasu of India, the 
Tursena of Asia Minor, the Tursha of Egypt, and the 
Tyrrhenians of Italy. It was they who became in the 
countries east of India the commercial race of the Pre- 
Sanskrit Bronze Age, who established in Mexico the rule 
of the Toltecs or Builders, whose Indian affinities I have 
traced in Chaptex IX. of this book, and Essay IX. Vol. II. 
of \\\z~Kuling Races of Prehistoric Times. They took with 
them to Mexico the Indian year of eighteen months of 
twenty days each, instituted during the last period of the 
Pandava rule, which became the Maya year of Mexico. 

It was the members of the Southern sections of these 
trading guild brotherhoods, the worshippers of the Munda 
sun-bird, as distinguished from the sun Ra or Ragh of the 
Northern gnomon-stone and the stone-circles, who distri- 
buted over the maritime countries they visited in their 
commercial voyages the sign of the Su-astika, the symbol 
of their sun-divinity. It represented in its female J-J and 
male LIZ forms, the annual circuits of the sun-bird round the 
heavens, going North as the hen-bird at the winter, and 
returning South as the sun-cock at the summer solstice, 
as described in pp. 98, 99. This symbol has been found 
in American graves in the Mississippi and Tennessee States, 
in Mexico, India, on the shores of the Mediterranean, and 
the Atlantic coasts as far North as Norway. 

It is one of the thirty-two sacred marks depicted on the 
feet of the Indian Buddha, whose image seated on the throne 
of the double Su-astika is shown in the illustration on p. 471. 
There it is that of the elephant-headed rain-god Gan-isha, 
the lord (is/ia) of the land (gan), who in the Nidanakatha 
is said to have entered his mother's side when he was con- 
ceived. This image comes from Copan in Mexico, and proves 
that in the legend of the sun-god of the Indian Su-astika 
known to the Toltec priests, this god was first the cloud-bird, 

c 2 



xxxvi Preface. 

whose tail appears at the back of the elephant's head. The 
name of his symbolic throne ought to be written Su-ashtaka, 
for it is the symbol of the Indian eighth (ashta) god of the 
eight-rayed star, the hero of the Mahabharata called Astika 
in the Astika Parva, where he is the son of Jarat-karu, the 
sister of the creating-god Vasuki, and Ashtaka in the Sam- 
bhava Parva, where he is the grandson of Yayati, both his 
progenitors being gods of time 1 . He was the chief priest 
of the sacrifice described in Chapter V. p. 271, at which 
Janamejaya, victorious {jayd) over birth {janani), destroyed 
all the Naga snake-gods of the Pole Star era, and introduced 
the worship of the sun-god, who did not, like his prede- 
cessors, die at the end of his yearly circuit of the heavens. 
Ashtaka, the sun of the eight-rayed star, who was once the 
cloud-bird Khu, became the newly-risen sun-bird, whose 
image crowned the last official altar of Hindu ritual, the 
building of which is described in Chapter IX. 

The symbol of the Su-astika is thus shown to have been 
probably first used as a year-sign by the worshippers of the 
eight-rayed star. It apparently succeeded the Triskelion, 
the earlier symbol of the revolving sun of the year of three 
seasons. This, which was originally the sign fy^, became 
the three-legged crest of the Isle of Man, 
which has on a Celtiberian coin, depicted by 
Comte Goblet dAlviella, the sun's face in the 
centre. It appears on a coin of Aspendus 
with the sun-cock beside it, and on a Lycian 
coin the feet become cocks' heads. The original sign has 
been found on a coin of Megara, on pottery from Arkansas, 
on a Scandinavian spear and brooch of the Bronze Age, 
and on the gold pummel of a sword found in Grave IV. in 

1 Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, xlviii. -p. 140. In Adi (Samb/iava) Parva, 
lxxxviii. — xciii., and in the Udyoga (Bhagavat-yana) Parva, cxviii. p. 347, 
he is Ashtaka. For the Udyoga Parva story of his birth as the fourth son 
of Madhavi, the goddess of mead (madhu), daughter of Yayati, of whom the 
god Shiva was the third, see Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., 
Essay iii., p. 318, 




Preface. xxxvii 

Schliemann's Excavations at Mycence. It gave the name 
Trinacria or Triquetra, the three-pointed isle, to Sicily, 
which is in the Odyssey the home of the 350 oxen and 350 
sheep of the sun-god, the meaning of which is discussed in 
Appendix C. p. 634 x . It is apparently a product of the age 
of the worship of Poseidon, the father of the sun-horse 
begotten of the horse-headed black Demeter, as the Great 
Potter, wielder of the creating Trident who raised islands 
from the sea. For the Triskelion, the three (tri) legged 
(cnceXos) symbol of the year-god, the Su-astika was sub- 
stituted when the sun-god, on whose feet it was depicted, 
became the god circling in his annual course the heavenly 
dome over-arching the eight-rayed star. It was first used as 
the female Su-astika pJJ the symbol of the sun-god born 
from the night of winter, and beginning its annual journey 
Northward at the winter solstice, and it was derived from 
the equilateral St. George's Cross — J— of the cycle-year. 
The date to which its origin must be assigned is apparently 
that traced in Chapter VII. Section A., The birth of the 
sun-god born from the Thigh, pp. 396 — 399, when the sun- 
god or sun-bird born from the Thigh-stars of the Great Bear, 
who circled the heavens as the independent measurer of 
annual time, was in Taurus at the winter solstice, and in 
Gemini in January — February about 10,200 B.C. After this 
he became the sun-god of the male Su-astika L-k who was 
nursed by the moon-goddess Maha Gotami Pajapati, the 
nurse of the Buddha, who tended him as he passed through 
the zodiac of the thirty stars during the three months 
November — December, December — January, and January — 
February, and was born as the " son of the majesty of Indra," 
the eel-god of the rivers of Chapter IV., the conquering 

1 Goblet d'Alviella, The Migration of Symbols, p. 54, Figs. 23 a ami d, 
p. 181, Figs. 87, 89; Nuttall, 'Fundamental Principles of Old and New 
World Civilisations,' vol. ii., Papers of the Peabody Museum, Harvard Uni- 
versity, pp. 28, 29; O'Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. ii. pp. 63511". > Shuchhardt, 
Schliemann's Excavations, Fig. 229, p. 232. 



xxxviii Preface. 

rain-god, at the Ekashtaka (p. 399) on the eighth day of the 
dark fortnight, or on the 23rd of Magh (January — February). 
He became the ruler of the year beginning in Greece on the 
1 2th of Anthesterion (February — March) with the Festival 
of the Anthesteria, or that of the Recall of the souls of the 
dead ; and started on his career as the conquering god of 
spring, who was to become at the summer solstice the 
victorious god of the elephant-headed rain-cloud, the god 
Gan-isha, who was then to begin his course Southward as 
the god of the male Su-astika. In this form he was the god 
of the year of thirteen months, whose yearly course beginning 
with his three-months passage through the thirty stars is 
traced in Chapter VII. p. 488. 

The sun-bird, the original parent-god of this long series 
of offspring forming the historical genealogy of the sun-god, 
is the Akkadian and Egyptian Khu, the Hindu Shu or Su. 
It was apparently, in the primaeval solar ritual, the red-headed 
woodpecker, for it is the heads and beaks of these birds that 
form the images of the Su-astika found in the American 
graves in Mississippi and Tennessee, and depicted in Figs. 
263, 264, 265, pp. 906 and 907 of Mr. Wilson's treatise on 
the Su-astika, published by the Smithsonian Institution at 
Washington x . In the centre of Fig. 264 are the points 
of the eight-rayed star surrounding a solstitial cross in a 



circle <{x<j>> and in Fig. 263, which is reproduced in Fig. 29 of 




Comte Goblet d'Alviella's Migration of Symbols, p. 58. There 
the central circle with the cross inscribed in it is surrounded 
with twelve instead of eight points. Both prove conclusively 
that the woodpecker represented in the form of a Su-astika 
the bird flying round the square in which the sun-circle 
is placed, and thus completing its year by circular course. This 
red-headed woodpecker, the sacred bird of the Algonquin 
Indians, is also the sun-bird Picus, the woodpecker of Latin 

1 'The Swastika.' Report of the United States National Museum, 1894, 
Washington, 1896. 



Preface. xxxix 

mythology, who became the red-capped Leprichaun, the 
dwarf guardian-god of treasure in Ireland and Germany J . 
Picus was the father of Faunus, the Italian deer-sun-god, 
and grandfather of Latinus. He is the god of the Indian 
Lat, our Lath, the wooden sun - gnomon - pillar on which 
Garuda is placed in the circle of Lats round the Indian 
temples. Garuda or Gadura is the sacred bird of Krishna 
the sun-antelope-god, who sits in his chariot and is repre- 
sented in the Mahabharata as the egg-born son of Vinata, 
the tenth wife of Kashyapa, and the tenth month of ges- 
tation of the Hindu lunar year of thirteen months. He 
was created, like Astika or Ashtaka, to devour the Naga 
snakes, the offspring of Ka-dru, the tree {dru) of Ka, the 
thirteenth wife of Kashyapa, and the thirteenth month of 
the year 2 . 

Thus the Latin triad : Picus the woodpecker ; Faunus, the 
deer-sun-god ; and Latinus, the sun-god of the tree of the 
woodpecker, is exactly equivalent to that of the Indian 
bird Gadura, the antelope-sun-god Krishna, and the Ka- 
dru Lat or tree-stem on which the bird sits. Furthermore 
the woodpecker Picus was the sacred bird of Mars, the 
god Martius of the Eugubine Tables, whose priests, as I 
show in Chapter V., Section F., p. 257, wore the sacrificial 
cord on the right shoulder and made their ritualistic cir- 
cuits contrary to the course of the sun, thus following the 
ritual of the Indian Pitaro Barishadah of the Lunar-Solar 
Age, who sat on seats (barhis) of Kusha-grass. This god 
Martius was the male form of the Indian Maruts or tree 
{marom) mothers, the goddesses of the Akkadian South- 
west wind Martu. 

Thus at both ends of the chain of Suastikas surrounding 
the world from America to Italy, we find proof that the 
original sun-bird of the forest races, who were the first 
founders of villages, was the red-headed woodpecker, the 



1 Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, Red Cap, pp. 162 — 164. 

2 Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, xvi. pp. 77 ft". 



xl Preface. 

typical bird of the Indian agriculturists whose harvests 
depended on the monsoons. And the memory of this 
bird survives in the reddened heads of the stake-gods, now- 
worshipped as Bhim-sen, the tree-ape-god, the Bhima of 
the Mahabharata, whose father was Maroti, the tree-ape, and 
who became the Rudra or red god of the Rigveda. 

The interest of the history thus told in the images of the 
sun and storm-bird is much increased when we observe that 
there is no indigenous Su-astika found in Arabia or Egypt, 
for the only Su-astika found in the latter country is, as Mr. 
Wilson shows, imported by Greek colonists. The lesson 
thus taught us is that the sun-god of these countries was 
not the sun-bird of the primaeval theology of the Mundas, 
but the Northern sun and fire-god Ra, Rai, or Ragh, the 
god of the gnomon-stone-pillar of the builders of Neolithic 
sun-circles, and that the worship of this god was so firmly 
implanted in Arabian and Egyptian ritual as to obliterate 
the worship of the earlier sun-bird, who was relegated to 
the Pole Star as the Pole Stars in Cygnus, the bird con- 
stellation, and as Vega, the Arabic El Nasr, the Egyptian 
Ma'at, and the Gan-dhari in the constellation of the Vul- 
ture, which was also called the Tortoise, and has since become 
our Lyra. It was the Kushika sons of the Tortoise who 
substituted the sun-god Ra, the Indian Raghu or Ra-hu, 
the father of Rama, whose mother was Kushaloya the 
house (aloyd) of the Kushites for the Munda sun- bird. 

The whole history thus told proves that the trading 
authors of these year symbols, established over the whole 
world to which their commerce extended a connected 
series of governments, who formed their institutions on the 
Dravidian and Kushika models I have sketched in this 
work. 

The dissemination by emigrants of the new cult originat- 
ing with each change of the year-reckoning which marked 
the history of the Myth-making Age, was continued un- 
interruptedly from the early ages of the Pleiades year down 
to the close of the mythic period. Instances proving this 



Preface. xli 

are well-known to all who study Folklore as a historical 
record, and among these I may quote two showing the 
advent to England, and the incorporation into English 
traditions, of very early rituals. In Chapter V. I have 
shown that the first worship of the upright equilateral cross 
of St. George, as a symbol of the creating year-god, dates 
from the inauguration in Asia Minor and Syria of the 
year measured by the equinoxes, in addition to the original 
solar seasons of the solstices. This year began with the 
autumnal equinox, and the festival of the finding of the 
Cross on the 14th September, seven days before the 
autumnal equinox, is still, as I have shown on p. 223, cele- 
brated in the Lebanon. This survives in Yorkshire in the 
custom of placing witch-wood, cut from the rowan or 
mountain-ash-trees, on the lintels of doors to preserve the 
house from witchcraft. This must be cut on St. Helen's 
Day, the 14th of September, from a tree which the person 
who collects the wood has never seen before, and the wood 
must not be cut with a household knife. The original 
Helen of this custom is not the wife of Constantine, who 
is said to have found the true Cross, but the much earlier 
Helen of Greece, the immortal daughter of Leda, and twin- 
sister of Polu-deukes, the rain-twin, who was worshipped 
as Helene Dendritis, the tree-mother Helene, the primaeval 
tree-mother of the South. 

The memory of the age of the introduction of the equi- 
noctial cult of the three-years cycle-year is also preserved 
in Yorkshire in a medicinal charm handed down by the 
pastoral races, who introduced this year in which time was 
measured by the four series, each of ten months of gestation, 
into which the three years were divided. In this prescription 
the sick animal is to be bled, and some hair of its mane, 
tail, and four quarters is to be placed in the flowing blood, 
together with three spoonfuls of salt taken from the mother- 
sea. The cure is to be completed by the concoction of a 
charm amulet made of the heart of a sheep, which, as the 
ram sacrificed at its commencement, was the sacred animal 



xlii Preface. 

of the cycle-year. In this were to be stuck nine new pins, 
nine new needles, nine small nails, indicating the twenty- 
seven days and three nine-day weeks of the cycle-month. 
This heart was then rolled in the blood, the consecrating 
Phrygian bath of Chapter IV. p. 188, before the days of the 
baptismal water of the sons of the rivers ; and at twelve 
o'clock at night the heart was to be put on a clear fire of 
elder, rowan, or ash, all trees which gave protection against 
witchcraft. If the charm is not successful it is to be repeated 
at the new and full-moon till the animal is cured or dead I . 

The twenty-seven days and three nine-day weeks of the 
month of the age ruled by the dealers in white or healing 
magic also survive in Lettish charms, which describe t the 
march of time as " thrice nine waggons passing along the 
street, thrice nine Perkoni emerging from the sea, thrice nine 
balls of string in the basket of the woman sitting at the foot 
of the hill, and the three servants (the three years of the 
cycle) with thrice nine arrows which issue from the sea 2 ." 
In these observances we find a union of the tree-worship 
of the South with the Northern worship of the sun-ram, 
which succeeded the earlier sun-deer. Also they give evi- 
dence of the belief in the mother-tree as a protest against 
the spells of the wizards and witches of the Northern Finn 
mythology, and of the Southern witchcraft brought from 
Africa by the sons of the bow. 

I must here also note the existing evidence of the ancient 
evolution which transformed the worship of the Great Bear 
as the Thigh of the Ape into that of the sun born of the 
Thigh, the sun-god of the fifteen-months year of Chapter VII. 
This is to be found in the measurement of the Chinese year. 
According to Professor Douglas, " The months and seasons 
are determined by the revolutions of Ursa Major (the Chinese 
name for which is Pek-tao, the Seven Directors). The tail 



1 Atkinson, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, pp. 99, 104 — 124. 

2 Abercromby, The Pre and Proto-Hisioric Finns, Lettish Charms, 42, 52, 
58, vol. ii. pp. 26 — 28. 



Preface. xliii 

of the constellation, pointing to the East at nightfall, 
announces the arrival of spring ; pointing to the South, 
the arrival of summer ; pointing to the West, the arrival of 
autumn ; and pointing to the North, the arrival of winter. 
This means of calculating the seasons becomes more intel- 
ligible when it is remembered that in ancient times the Bear 
was much nearer the North Pole than now, and revolved 
round it like the hand of a clock." Also the Chinese Zodiac 
is represented with the Pole Star and circumpolar constel- 
lations in the centre J . Hence arose the belief that the 
Great Bear took the sun, its offspring, sunwards round the 
Pole. 

The growth of this myth, and the history it tells, are still 
further illustrated by the astronomy of the Micmac Indians 
of America, who believed that the seasonal changes were 
indicated by the Great Bear. They say that in mid-spring 
the Bear-mother climbs out of her den, the Corona Borealis. 
In mid-summer she runs along the Northern horizon ; soon 
after she assumes an erect position, and then topples on her 
back as the dying bear of autumn. In mid-winter she lies 
dead on her back, but then her den, the Corona Borealis, has 
reappeared with the Bear of the New Year invisible within. 
This comes forth again in spring to be again slain by the 
autumn hunters, and to complete a fresh yearly circuit of 
the Pole 2 . 

A further historical variant of this primaeval myth of the 
year Bear succeeding the sun-reindeer, which dropped its 
horns in autumn, is to be found in the myth of Theseus, who 
found his way to the centre of the Labyrinth in which he 
slew the Minotaur of Crete by the clue furnished to him by 
Ariadne, who was raised to heaven as the Corona Borealis, 



1 Douglas, China, London, 1SS7, p. 418; Medhurst, 'Astronomy of the 
Chinese,' Ancient China, Shanghai, 1846. 

' Stansbury Hagar, 'The Celestial Bear,' Journal of American Folklore, vol. 
xiii., no. xlix. July, 1900 ; Zelia Nuttall, 'Fundamental Principles of Old and 
New World Civilisations,' pp. 510, note 1, 511. Papers of Peabody Museum, 
Harvard University, vol. ii. 1901. 



xliv Preface. 

after she had borne to Dionysos, the wine-god, the two 
autumn sons CEnopion, the wine (6t,vo$) drinker (tticov), and 
Staphylus, the bunch of grapes (ara^vXr]). She was the 
daughter of Minos, the measurer, and Pasiphase, she who 
shines ($aiv) to all (iraac), the moon-goddess, who was also 
the concubine of the Minotaur, the bull of the Labyrinth, 
who is, as we shall now see, the Great Bear Constellation 
of the Seven Bulls *. 

This Labyrinth is the den of the god of the Labrus, the 
Carian name for the double-axe, the symbol used at Gnossus, 
now being excavated by Mr. Evans, to denote the supreme 
God 2 , the Greek ire\eKvs, the divine weapon of the year-god 
lost, as I show in Appendix C. p. 631, by Odusseus, when 
he was wrecked on his voyage from Ogygia, the island of 
Calypso, to the Phoenician land of Alkinoos. He was 
obliged to throw into the sea the double-axe and the rest 
of his solar panoply by Ino, who saved him in the form 
of a sea-gull, and gave him the kredemnon or ribbon of the 
zodiacal stars, on which he was brought to land as the naked 
god of the new year of seventeen-months of twenty-one days 
each, described in Chapter VIII. This Pelekus is the Greek 
form of the Indian Parasu, the double-axe of the two lunar 
crescents of Parasu Rama, the son of Jamadagni, the twin 
(jama) fires engendered in the mother-trees, the Banyan 
(Funs Indica) and the Pipal (Ficus religiosa) by his grand- 
father Richika, the divine fire-spark. He was the god, son 
of the bisexual plant, kindled into life by the lightning of the 
rain-storm. His mother was Renuka, the flower-pollen, and 
he, as I show in Chapter V. pp. 260, 261, recovered the 
year-calf, born of the year-cow after ten lunar-months of 
gestation. This had been stolen by Arjuna, the son of 
Karta-virya, the star-god Orion, the son of the Krittakas 
or spinning (kari) Pleiades, who slew Jamadagni. Rama, 
in revenge, slew with his Parasu or double-lunar-axe Arjuna 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi. , pp. 559, 560, 

2 Evans, 'Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult.' Journal of Hellenic Studies, 
vol. xxi. Part i., 1901, pp. 109, no. 



Preface. xlv 

and all the Haihaias, the men of the Pole Star age, and 
established the ritual of the eleven-months year. 

In this story the secret is disclosed of the year of the 
Minotaur, the bull, which, as the- Zend Haptoiringas, the 
seven bulls, replaced the Bear as the title of the constellation 
Ursa Major. The bull successor of the bear was the god 
of the Labyrinth of the Labrus or double-lunar-axe, the 
god whose year was measured by the movements of the Great 
Bear and Ariadne Corona Borealis. She was described as 
the year -star when the year of Hippolytus, the son of 
Theseus, and the Olenian Poseidon, the constellation of 
Auriga, the Charioteer, and the Little Goat Capella, de- 
scribed in Chapter VI. Section F. pp. 338 — 341, was intro- 
duced as that which measured time by the passage of the 
sun, watched by the guardian charioteer, through the stars 
of the Zodiac. 

We find similar relics of the old beliefs of the Myth-making 
Age preserved in local customs, rituals and stories all over 
the world. Wherever we go we find that it is among the 
villagers, the Latin Pagani, the men of the village (pagtis), 
that the conservative instinct, derived from the first founders 
of village communities and tribes, has led them to preserve 
in their festivals, games, and social ceremonies, the rites 
of the dead or altered faiths of the past. 

As a surviving instance of the universal history told in the 
symbols of the Myth-making Age, I will here cite the 
arrangement of the hierarchy of the Dervishes attached to 
the Ka'bah, or Mosque of Mecca containing the Holy Black 
Stone, the original Northern mother of fire to the race who 
traced their descent from the volcanic fire-mountain Ararat. 
These Dervishes are arranged in groups representing the 
supporting-pillars and minarets of the Holy Temple of 
Heaven, symbolised in the vaulted dome, the most sacred 
form of building in the eyes of Mahommedan architects. 
The top and central pillar is the Head Dervish, called the 
Kutb, or Pillar of the Pole Star God, the keystone of the 
vault. To his right and left are the two Umena or faithful 



xlvi Preface. 

ones, representing the two seasons of spring and winter, 
standing on both sides of the central summer, and also the 
first and third years of the cycle-year. Below these are 
the four Ev-tads, meaning the tent-pegs, the four divisions 
each of ten lunar months of gestation making up the cycle- 
year. Next to them come the five En-var or lights, the 
five-day weeks of the first Pleiades and Solar years. Next 
the seven Akhyar or Good, the seven days of the week of the 
seventeen and thirteen-months year, who are followed by the 
eight Nukeba or deputies, the eight-days week of the fifteen- 
months year. Below all these are the forty who complete 
the number of the rijal-i-ghaib, the unseen, the forty lunar- 
months of the cycle-year. At the base of the Mount of the 
Congregation thus formed by the sixty-seven ministering 
priests, who claim descent from the rain prophet-god Elias 
or Eliun, are the seventy Budela or assistants x . These 
seventy, with the three head Dervishes, make up the seventy- 
three slayers of the barley-year-god Osiris (Orion), that 
is to say they are the equivalents of Set or Hapi, the 
ape-god, and his seventy-two assistants, the seventy-three 
five-day weeks of the year of 365 days. The number 
seventy may also, as I show in Appendix C. p. 636, probably 
represent the seventy weeks of five days of a year of 350+ 10 
days. The seventy representing the 350 days, while the 
last ten are the two weeks which make up the seventy-two 
weeks of the year of 360 days, they being reckoned as a time 
of rest ending a year of ten months of thirty-five days. 

In conclusion, I have to record my best thanks to all 
living authors whose works have helped me in my researches; 
especially to Mr. R. Brown, Jun., F.S.A. ; Professor Rhys, 
Principal of Jesus College ; and Mr. Warde-Fowler, Sub- 
Rector of Lincoln College ; from whom I have learnt the 
greater part of the knowledge I have acquired of Akkadian 
Astronomy, Celtic Historical Mythology and Folklore, and 
of Roman Ritual as preserved in the Calendar of Festivals. 

1 O'Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. i., ' The Heavens, Palace, and ils Pillar,' 
p. 229. 



vy Preface. xlvii 

z^/ -f~M. fa, ^A-^try /^L^ 

And above all others to Professor Eggeling of Edinburgh 
University, whose translation of the Satapatha Brdhmana in 
the Series of Sacred books of the East, has made the whole 
history of Brahmanic ritual accessible to all students. This 
includes not only Vedic ritual, but also ceremonies dating 
back to the most ancient observances of the first pioneers of 
civilisation, who formed the years measured by the five-days 
weeks of the goddess Brihati, and it may therefore be looked 
on as a ritualistic history of Indian theology in all its phases. 
I have also to especially thank Mr. J. A. Frazer for the great 
assistance I have found in his admirable edition of Pausanias, 
who has described the historical monuments and ritual of 
Greece as they existed in the days of Greek and Roman 
supremacy. 

I may also here note that all references to the Mahabharata 
in this volume are to the admirable English translation of 
Kesari Mohun Gangidi, edited by the late Protap Chandra 
Rai, CLE. 

Readers of this work who have also read or consulted my 
Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times will find that I have in 
several instances given interpretations of ancient legend 
differing from those in the latter work. These are the 
result of further study of the subject, which has enabled 
me to replace doubtful interpretations based on apparent 
probabilities by the far sounder conclusions disclosed by 
the actual facts learnt from a more thorough examination 
of the successive forms of ritual. This has enabled me to 
determine accurately the sequence of the methods of measur- 
ing the week, the first unit in historical chronology, and the 
order and chronology of the different forms of year-reckoning 
following one another with the accompaniment of funda- 
mental changes in the national rituals. I had not, when I 
wrote the Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, been able to 
discriminate these so fully and certainly as I can now. 



w' \-%/\sj ^ ro-^D /^-osfanT 1 









■ 






<^r o-t~* 









BOOK I. 
THE AGE OF POLE STAR WORSHIP. 



CHAPTER I. 

Introductory Sketch. 

ONE of the objects most anxiously sought for by those 
who try to discover the foundations of civilisation must 
be a field of research in which the relics of the past have 
been carefully preserved in their original form from the 
earliest dawn of ancient national life, and in which we can 
examine not only the earliest strata but also those which 
followed them successively, and find each effectually dis- 
criminated from those which came before and after it. It is 
only from observations made on such a site that we can gain 
a clear idea of the first aspects of social life, and learn what 
manner of men the pioneers of the advance of humanity were- 
It is only there that we can accurately learn their mode of 
thinking, recover their first conceptions of the causes of 
natural phenomena and the rules by which primitive society 
was governed ; and thus trace the steps by which they 
advanced from a state of infancy to one of confident man- 
hood. It is only by a studious examination of the facts 
revealed by this quest that we can transport ourselves to 
the primitive point of view, and learn to think the thoughts 
and see with the eyes of those who began their task of 
organisation in the midst of the tangled jungles of un- 
tamed nature. The primitive relics necessary to enable 
us to reconstruct in a living picture the phases of primaeval 
life are to be found more abundantly than elsewhere in 
the history of ritual and of the local customs of the 
earliest villages. And the stages indicating the progress 

B 



2 History and Chronology 

made by these infant communities and their descendants are 
especially marked by the successive methods used to mea- 
sure annual time and to fix the dates for the religious national 
festivals. The history of time measurement is the leading 
subject of this work, and each change in the reckoning 
of the year will be treated of in separate chapters, which 
will review shortly the social changes accompanying the 
alteration in the calculation of the national year. The 
first villages were founded by men whose chief object was 
to join together the present and the past by a bond of 
customary observances which required each succeeding 
generation to follow exactly the customs which had been 
proved to promote the prosperity of the community. 

These villages, out of which, as will be seen in the sequel, 
provincial and national governments have grown, were the 
rude settlements of the nomad agriculturists of the forests 
of Southern India and the Indian Archipelago. They ap- 
parently began their agricultural work on plans similar to 
those still followed by the wandering cultivating tribes of 
the Indian and Australian forests. The country traversed 
by them was, as the number of its occupants increased, 
divided among a number of communities, to each of which 
a fixed area of territory was assigned by the local custom 
still prevailing in the wilder districts of India and in 
Australia. The boundaries of these areas are carefully 
defined, and each tribe pursues its avocations within its own 
limits. The men employ their time chiefly in hunting 
animals for food, while the women search for vegetable 
food such as roots, fruits and edible grass seeds. 

It was among these women that agriculture first originated 
in India, for it was they who first secured yearly crops by 
sowing the seeds of the wild rice and the coarse local millets 
such as Murwa, the Raggi of Madras, the African Dhurra 
(Eleusine Coracana). Evidence of the preservation in the 
national memory of this origin of rice cultivation is given 
by the bundles of wild rice which every peasant in the 
east of Central India still hangs up in his house in August 



of the Myth-Making Age. 3 

as a thank-offering when the young rice begins to sprout. 
Also by the figures of the seasonal buffalo dance of the 
rice-growing season still danced in every village in Chutia 
Nagpore. In these, all the operations of the preparation 
of the soil and the sowing of the crop are performed, sym- 
bolically, by the women dancers. 

It was when this custom of sowing seeds had been es- 
tablished that the first attempt to change the encampment 
into a permanent village was undertaken. Huts, which 
were practically mere bush shelters, were made of a few 
tree boughs stuck in the ground and so placed as to give 
shelter against the prevailing winds, and each settlement 
was only occupied as long as the fertility of the soil lasted. 
In India they were generally placed on the higher slopes 
of the hills, where open spaces were more frequent and 
the forests were not so thick and tangled as on the banks 
of the streams and rivers. Fire, kindled by the friction 
of two pieces of wood, was probably used from the earliest 
times by the southern forest folk, and it was with the help 
of fire that, as they still do, they cleared the under-growth 
from the soil and used the ashes as' fertilising manure. 
The first weapon used in South India and Australia for 
killing game was apparently the boomerang, shaped by 
flint implements, This is still used for killing hares and 
small animals by the Kullars of Paducottah in the Madura 
district of the Madras Presidency J , and its returning pro- 
perties were not discovered till a later period. This and 
the digging-stick were the only weapons except stones 
which they could use for warlike purposes. But they were 
naturally a most peaceful race, who like their descendants 
thought agriculture to be their true business, and did not 
waste their time in invading the territory of their neigh- 
bours, which yielded nothing which they could not find at 
home. Quarrels of course arose from time to time, but 
these, even in cases of boundary disputes, were very short 

1 Sewell, Some Points of Archccology in South India, p. 12. Read before 
the Oriental Congress at Paris, 1897. 

B 2 



4 History and Chronology 

and ended in a peaceful adjustment of differences, and 
sometimes in a re-arrangement of boundaries or an amal- 
gamation of two adjacent areas when one tribe wanted, 
owing to its increase in numbers, an addition of territory 
which the other could spare. 

In the earliest times little or no regard was paid to descent, 
and every one admitted into a community at once obtained 
all the rights belonging to the older members, provided 
they obeyed all the rules and regulations laid down by 
the tribal leaders. And the memory of these primitive 
times still survived in the later age, when most rigid rules 
regulating tribal customs of descent and initiation into the 
national secret rites were enacted ; for even then provision 
was made to enable members of neighbouring tribes to 
change from one to another. Regulations for this purpose 
still exist in the Central Australian tribes. Thus the 
Matthurie, who reckon descent by the mother's side, and 
the Arunta, who observe the rule of paternal descent, and 
who were therefore, as will be shown in the sequel, originally 
ethnologically distinct races, allow individuals, under rules 
made for the purpose, to pass freely from one tribe to 
the other r . Also in India very many if not the larger 
number of castes are ready to admit aliens to all caste 
privileges, provided they become members of the caste. 
And these castes have grown out of the original village 
organisation. 

In the early struggle for existence and for the conquest 
of the obstacles to progress offered by natural forces, the 
most successful communities were those who had acquired 
the dogged determination engendered by a strict observance 
of ordained custom, and who had added to this a wise 
discrimination which made them ready to adopt improve- 
ments conceived by those members of the association who 
were endowed with inventive intellects. But in order 
to imprint these qualities on the national character, and 

1 Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, chap. ii. 
pp. 68, 69. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 5 

to make all the information possessed and acquired by any 
community permanently useful, it was above all things 
necessary that the younger generations should be carefully 
instructed in all the knowledge known to their parents. 
Hence those who founded permanent villages were men who 
insisted on the maintenance of communal education in the 
widest sense of sympathy with the past in all its tasks, 
both practical and theoretical. This they looked on as the 
first primary necessity for securing the continuance and 
healthy growth of the community. This and the requisition 
of absolute obedience from their associates and the young 
of both sexes to all rules passed by the ruling elders were 
the key-notes of their policy. 

It was by a rigid adherence to these fundamental prin- 
ciples that the character of the Dravidian people of 
Southern India, who call themselves the sons of the village 
tree, was developed. Like their congeners the Chinese 
they are exceptionally persevering, and also exceptionally 
obstinate. They are perfectly obedient to all recognised 
authority, except when compliance with the orders they 
receive involves the transgression of any of their cherished 
national customs. When such a collision occurs obedience 
is not necessarily openly refused, but the order is certain 
to be evaded by every possible device, and ultimately the 
new rule will inevitably become a dead letter, unless the 
legislator who has convinced himself of its ultimate utility 
has sufficient tact and perseverance to prove to the 
recalcitrant people that it is a step in advance, which when 
made will be a public benefit. The difficulty of securing 
the acceptance of anything that savours of novelty among 
a Dravidian population can only be fully appreciated by 
those who have lived among them and governed them. 
But one thing the innovator can be certain of is, that if he 
gains hearty acquiescence to his reforms from these people 
the consent given will not be readily withdrawn, for they 
are entirely destitute of the fickleness of character which 
makes the laughter-loving Mundas of the East so much 



6 History and Chronology 

more unreliable, and so much more liable to paroxysms 
of popular excitement than the silent and self-contained 
Dravidians of the South-west. 

These two races were, when united together in India, the 
founders of the Hindoo national ritual with its accom- 
panying rules for the measurement of annual time. These 
they took with them all over Asia, North Africa, and 
Europe, together with their village institutions, and in this 
dissemination of the Indian village organisation the 
Dravidian element was the dominant factor. In the ritual 
they founded every festival was performed on the date 
fixed by the national authority, according to the successive 
measurements of annual time. These measurements, as 
I shall prove in the course of this work, enable us to 
establish a chronological succession of ritualistic changes 
introduced by the recurring amalgamations of new national 
elements. But throughout all these changes the original 
spirit of intense inborn conservatism, and of the desire for 
the preservation of the memory of the nation's past history, 
as recorded in its national ritual, always prevailed. In the 
rituals of India, South-western Asia, and Europe, founded 
under Dravidian influence, every prescribed gesture, motion 
and word had its own peculiar meaning, and was intended 
to impress some truth on the national mind ; and in order 
that these ceremonies should preserve unchanged the 
especial meaning meant to be inculcated by those who 
prescribed them, it was necessary that even when altered 
by authority the original teachings should find a place 
in the new arrangement, and that no change should be 
made except by the central ruling power. Hence the very 
smallest iota of ritual, even the tones and modulations 
of the voice, became as soon as they were prescribed of 
equal importance with the most impressive rites. It there- 
fore became a fundamental rule that the slightest mistake 
in any part of a religious ceremony rendered it null and 
void J . 

1 Maine, Ancient Lazv, p. 276 ; Mommsen, History of Rome, translated by 



of the Myth-Making Age. 7 

As an instance of the practical working out of changes 
in these conservative rituals, the history of the rain-wand, 
the magic staff of office of the rain-priest, is most instructive. 
The holder of this wand, which became as the last of its 
transformations the royal sceptre, was the priest of the 
earliest god worshipped as the national deity by both the 
hunting and the agricultural races. For his recognised 
existence as the god who ordained and effected the season- 
able advent of the life-giving rain was, as we are told in 
the Brahmanas, the first conception formed of a supreme 
divine being 1 . The rain-wand, which was believed to 
possess magical power over the elements, was originally 
cut from the tribal parent-tree, which gave it its effective 
force, and the history of this divine mother-tree reaches 
back to the most primitive ages of national life. This 
magic rod became among the Zends the Baresma or rain 
{bares) bundle of sticks cut from a thornless tree, the 
pomegranate, date-palm, or tamarind tree, of which the 
two former trees marked, as we shall see, epochs in national 
history 2 . In Hindu ritual it was the Prastara. In the rules 
laid down for the earliest elaborate sacrifice prescribed in 
the Indian Brahmanas, the New and Full Moon offerings 
made on the earth altar shaped in the form of a woman, 
the Prastara is ordered to be made of three sheaves of Kusha 
grass (Poa cynosuroides), the parent-grass of the race of the 
Kushikas or Kushites, who ruled India when the sacrifice 
was instituted, the people led from Syria to India by the 
sun-antelope whose favourite food was this grass. To these 
sheaves flowering shoots were added, and the whole repre- 
sented the three seasons of the year, and also the three years 



W. P. Dickson, vol. i. p. 1S1, where he shows that ceremonies in Roman 
ritual were repeated even as often as seven times in succession till perfect 
correctness was attained. The same scrupulous accuracy in every detail was 
required, as Maine shews, in primitive legal proceedings. 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xiii. 2, 6, 14 ; S. B. E., vol xliv. p. 315. 

2 Darmesteter, Zcndavesta Fargard, iii. 1 ; xix. iS, 19; S. B. E., vol. 
iv. pp. 22, note 2, 209. 



8 History and Chronology 

forming the cycle year described in Chapter V. r But 
when the rule of these Kushika emigrants from Syria to 
India was succeeded by that of the Ikshvaku kings, the 
sons of the sugar-cane {iksha), who called themselves also 
the sons of the sun-horse, the Prastara used in their Soma 
sacramental sacrifice was no longer made of Kusha but 
of Ashvavala or horse-tail {ashvd) grass {saccharum spon- 
taneum), a species of grass allied to the parent sugar-cane 2 . 

These changes in the ritual of the invocation of the rain 
recorded a series of religious revolutions extending, as we 
shall see, over thousands of years, beginning with the time 
when the priest was the national magician, the represen- 
tative on earth of the mother-goddess of the worshippers 
of the Pole Star and the rain-cloud or bird circulating 
round it with the setting and rising stars, the rain-bird 
invoked in the prayer for rain 3. The next change in the 
evolution of belief in the divine ruler of time was that which 
ascribed the rule of the times and seasons to the moon-god 
or goddess to whom the New and Full Moon sacrifices were 
offered in the age of the Prastara of Kusha grass. This 
began somewhat before 10,000 B.C., when Vega in the 
Constellation of the Vulture or Lyra became Pole Star, and 
was followed by the epoch of the worship of the sun-horse, 
which began while Vega was the Pole Star before 8000 B.C. 
We find in the changing rituals of the long historical drama 
most striking evidence of the continuity of ritualistic tradi- 
tion maintained in different countries by their successive 
inhabitants, who though ethnologically altered by their 
union with alien immigrant stocks, yet still remembered 
and observed the traditional ritual of their various ancestors. 
Throughout this whole period the original basic elements 
of belief in the mother-tree, the ape or raven parent of life 



1 Eggeling, Sat. Brdk., i. 8, 3, II — 14; ii. 5, 1, 18; S. B. E. 3 vol. xii. pp. 
240, 242, 388, 389, note 1. 

2 Ibid., iii. 4, 1, 17, 18 ; S. B. E., vol. xxvi. p. 89, note 3. 

3 Ibid., i., 8, 3, 14; S. B. E. , vol. xii. p. 242. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 9 

and ruler of the year measured by the revolution of the 
stars and sun round the Pole, remained radically the same 
though the outward form was changed. Thus the original 
mother-tree of the village grove, after passing through 
various phases which will be set forth in their respective 
order, became first the mother rice of the primitive villagers ; 
then the parent-grass of the Kushikas, the favourite food 
of the antelope sun-god whom they worshipped ; and after 
that the horse-tail sugar-grass of the irrigating Dravido- 
Turanian farmers who watered their lands from the river- 
channels made by their engineering skill, and thus cul- 
tivated and improved the sugar-grass into the sugar-cane 
of commerce. It was these sons of Danu, the Pole Star 
god, who afterwards adored the white sun-horse, the star 
Sirius, whose history will occupy a very conspicuous place 
in this historical survey. Throughout all the countries to 
which the Indian village system has penetrated, the most 
strenuous maintainers of law and order have been those who 
have kept up the strict discipline first inculcated by their 
Dravidian ancestors. It is owing to the rule insisted upon 
by the first village rulers that the village elders and matrons 
should train the young of both sexes in all the practical and 
theoretical knowledge possessed by the community that the 
education of civilised man has been carried on. Oral 
instruction was given in the form of stories which had to 
be learnt by heart from the dictation of the teacher, like 
the lessons still given to Brahmin pupils and those which 
were taught in the Buddhist curriculum and in the village 
Patshalas or schools. But these stories were not dry state- 
ments of facts or metaphysical precepts like those in 
Brahmanic and Buddhistic literature, but tales which inter- 
ested their young hearers, in which first nature myths and 
subsequently national history were depicted as the work of 
the authors of natural phenomena. An excellent example 
of these stories is that of Nala and Damayanti in the 
Mahabharata, which contained, as I have shown elsewhere, 
the first plan of the plot of this great national history in verse 



lb History and Chronology 

combined with meteorological teaching I . This first draft 
of the later Epic poem gives us a detailed account of the 
evolution of the seasons, and tells how Nala, the appointed 
channel of the year's course, is wedded at the winter solstice 
to Damayanti, the earth, which is to be tamed and made 
fruitful. They lived happily together till the burning hot 
season, called the gambler Pushkara, the maker of Push, 
the moisture concealed in the black rain-cloud, comes to 
interfere with their felicity. He strips Nala of his wealth, 
that is to say dries up the surface of the earth, and drives 
both him and Damayanti into the forests. Thence Nala 
passes up to Ayodhya as the charioteer of the South West 
Monsoon bringing the life-giving rain. As the ruler of the 
Monsoon rains he takes service with King Ritu-parna, the 
wing (pama) or guide of the customary {ritu) course of 
the seasons, and returns with him at the end of the rainy 
season with the North East Monsoon, to be reunited to 
Damayanti and to recover his kingdom from the gambling 
conqueror Pushkara. 

In these stories, as will be seen in the numerous specimens 
I shall quote in the course of this work, the names of the 
actors are never names of individuals but symbolic signs, 
showing clearly, in all cases in which the story can be 
traced to its original source, the meaning of the tale. 

The teaching thus given, and the manual work insisted 
on, implanted in the minds of each generation habits of 
industry and a stock of information and acquired practice, 
which enabled them to continue the work of their pre- 
decessors, and add to it fresh materials contributed by 
their own brains and experience. It still survives in the 
Patshalas or schools found in every village in India, and 
also in the customs still existing among the Nairs, the 
representative Dravidians of Madras, the Marya or tree 
(marom) Gonds, the Ooraons of Chutia Nagpore and the 
Nagas of Assam. In all the villages peopled by these 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times , vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 64 — 76. 



of the Myth-Making Age. i I 

races, the young of both sexes are taken from their mothers 
as soon as they can dispense with her care, and lodged 
in separate establishments provided for each sex. That for 
boys, called by the Ooraons the Dhumkuria or boys' hall, 
is superintended by the village elders, that for girls by the 
matrons ; and in these they are carefully trained in their 
respective duties as members of the village community. 
This hall originally appropriated to the young men and 
boys was also, as it still is in Burmah, the place where 
strangers were entertained and waited on by the young 
pupils. This custom exists among the Fijis r , and also 
in the Melanesian and Caroline Islands 2 , and it is a survival 
of the organisation of the earliest permanent villages, in 
which originally all the villagers ate together as members 
of one family. In Europe it was maintained by the Cretans 
and Spartans, who looked upon all children born as the 
children of their native village, and educated the boys and 
girls apart under State guardianship. This custom, which 
survived in Crete and Sparta, was apparently one originally 
observed by all the Dorian races of Asia Minor and Greece, 
and by the ^Enotrians and Sikels of South Italy and Sicily, 
the Arcadians of Phigalia, the Argives, Megarians and 
ancient Corinthians, all of whom ate together in the fashion- 
described by Aristotle, their food being provided by the 
public granaries where the harvests of each village were 
stored 3. The duty of public education was one recognised 
by the carefully taught Babylonians and Egyptians, both 
of which nations obtained their civilisation and their earliest 
agricultural population from India. Also by all the nations 
of the Mediterranean race whose descent can be traced 
back to the Turvasu or Turano Dravidians of India, and 



* Abercromby, Seas and Skies in many Latitudes, pp. 192 — 197, ioi — 104. 

2 Codrington, The Melanesians : their Anthropology and Folklore, chap. V, 
pp. 74 — 77. The information about the Caroline Islands was given to me 
verbally by Mr. F. W. Christian who knows them well. 

3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii. , Essay iii., p. 297. 



12 History and Chronology 

who are shown by their sculls to have formed a distinct 
human family r . 

This national education and the custom of common meals 
was universal throughout South Western Asia and Europe 
wherever the village grove and the village halls existed. 
This is proved by the fact that even in those lands where the 
later institution of marriage and the substitution of house- 
hold for village life had caused the discontinuance of common 
meals, they survived everywhere throughout the ancient world 
in the national religious festivals, for in these the people 
of every township feasted together on local feast-days on 
the flesh of the animals sacrificed. The Gemeinde Haus of 
Germany, the Gemeente Haus of Flanders, and the Hotel 
de Ville in France, still maintain in every village the re- 
membrance of the days when the Dravidian village system 
extended over the civilised world, and when, according 
to Greek and Syrian traditions the coast lands of the 
Mediterranean Archipelago were ruled by the Amazons, 
the Rephaim of the Bible, or children of the giant [repha) 
star Argo. The villages founded by the Dravido Mundas 
on these conservatively progressive lines were arranged 
in groups of ten or twelve villages, each group forming 
a Parha or province. This had been the original territory 
of the earlier races who combined agriculture with hunting, 
and this primitive state of things still survives in full vigour 
in the volcanic plateaux or Pats of Chutia Nagpore occupied 
by the Korwas. Each of their tribes has a certain area 
of plateau reserved to itself by primaeval custom, and 
within the large limits thus marked out they have always 
pursued their original avocations as hunters, and have 
added to the produce of the chase the food grown on 
the cultivated clearings which are almost entirely tilled 
by the women. The number of residents in each clearing 
is small, and the different settlements are separated by 

1 G. Sergi, Origine e Diffmione della Stirpe Mediterranea Induzioni Anthro- 
pologiche. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 13 

large expanses of forest and waste, within which they choose 
new camping-grounds when the soil round their present 
residences is exhausted. While each settlement has its 
chief, the union of each tribal section is preserved by the 
Byga or priest who makes and consecrates the tribal arrows. 
He on the Lahsun Pat belonging to the group of Korwas 
I have most thoroughly studied, lived in the central clearing 
of the tribal territory. 

Property among these people is absolutely communal, 
and the produce both of the land and the chase is divided 
among all the members of the tribe living in each associ- 
ated unit. The only permanent superior among them is 
the Byga, who superintends the festivals in which the 
weather gods of the recurring seasons of the year are pro- 
pitiated. They are almost literally dwellers in trees, as 
their huts are made of a few branches of trees stuck in 
the ground with their tops meeting so as to form a sort of 
roof ridge. The only permanent village in this territory 
of united provinces, covering an area of about 600 square 
miles in Jushpore and Sirgoojya, is that of the chief of the 
allied tribes who lives in the south-west corner of the country 
on the slopes of the valley of the river Maini in Jushpore. 

The next step upward from these rude institutions, 
marking the first efforts to form a nation of communities 
living in permanent settlements, is to be found in the 
villages of the Kols or Mundas and those of the Marya 
or tree (marom) Gonds. The Mundas speak a language 
allied to that of the Korwas and also to that of the Mons 
or Peguans, and the Kambhojas of Burmah and Siam, and 
to that of some of the tribes in Assam. This marks them 
as immigrants from the North-east into India, where they 
now dwell as a separate race in the eastern lands of the 
Chutia Nagpore plateau, the mountain boundary of the 
Gangetic valley on the west. But they were formerly dis- 
tributed all over India as the Mallis or mountain races 
who were with the Dravidians the original founders of 
the national institutions and the first cultivators of the 



14 History and Chronology 

soil. The Dravidian element is represented in Central 
India by the Marya or tree Gonds. 

In villages founded by these pioneer races the central 
plot is occupied by the village grove, called by the Mundas 
Sarna. In it a number of the forest trees have been left 
standing when the cultivated lands were cleared of timber. 
These are the parent trees of the village, the home of the 
gods of life. The tree looked on by the Mundas as that 
ensuring the best luck to the future community is the Sal 
tree (Shorea robusta), yielding a most valuable timber. It 
also furnishes a resin similar to that of the pine trees of the 
northern forests, their original home. The Indian Mundas, 
whom I shall trace later on to China, say that their home 
is the land of the Sal tree, and hence in founding a village 
they prefer to place it in a Sal forest. In that case the 
only trees in the village grove are Sal trees, for no other 
tree grows naturally in the land they occupy, and thus 
the boundaries of the Sal forests are always clearly marked 
off from those on which various kinds of timber flourish. 
I remember noticing this especially in the forest tracts 
of Seehawa, in the South-east of Chuttisgurh, in the 
Central Provinces where the Mahanadi rises. The whole 
province, when I surveyed it in 1867, was an expanse of 
woodland interspersed with very few villages, and to the 
north of the infant river the forests contained trees of 
many different species. To the south of this tract was 
a narrow belt of cleared land not more than a few hundred 
yards wide, and on the other side of this was the Sal forest 
tract, in which nothing but Sal trees grew. Round the 
Central Sarna is the ring of cultivated land separating the 
grove hallowed as the home of the mother gods of the 
newly founded village from the world of death outside. 
Under its shade is the Akra, or dancing ground, where 
the village dances are held at each recurring season of 
the year. The dances of one season are distinguished from 
those of another by a distinct step and figure, and it is 
only with reluctance, and as a special favour, that the Kol 



of the Myth-Making Age. 1 5 

dancers will dance all the steps and figures together, or 
any set of them out of their own season. 

These villages are ruled by a head man called the Munda, 
elected by the community, and though the succession to the 
office is now generally hereditary, yet this rule was certainly 
unknown in primitive times, when descent in families was 
non-existent, and it is now often disregarded when the 
Munda's heirs prove incompetent. That these villages 
grouped themselves within the area of the uncleared 
hunting province or Parha is proved by their retention of 
the Byga, who performs for the ten or twelve villages into 
which it is divided the customary sacrifices, including those 
of the fowls offered to the sun and earth gods. Each Parha 
is ruled by a Manki, who is generally Munda of the central 
or chief village, and this is sometimes the parent village 
of the group whence the dwellers in the other villages have 
emigrated to form Tolas or hamlets in the uncleared forest. 
These swarmings took place like those of bees, when the 
population increased too much to allow the rising generation 
to find land easily accessible from the dwellings under the 
shade of the parent Sarna. To judge from the tribal 
customs of the Korwas, who have no village grove, the 
rule of leaving the Sarna standing was one derived from 
the Dravidians of Southern India. It was taught to the 
Mundas when they intermingled with the dwellers in the 
land on their first arrival in India by the Marya, or tree 
(marom) Gonds. They are the aboriginal or southern section 
of the Naga race of Central India, the Nagpore country, 
whose ruling tribes are of northern Turanian origin. It 
was these Naga, or Raj Gonds, who succeeded the confederacy 
of Dravidians and Mundas, or Mallis, in the rule of Northern 
and Central India, which was anciently known first as 
Ahikshetra J , the land of the Ahi, or Nag, the snake parent, 



1 This is the name given to Northern Panchala in the Mahabharata Adi 
(Sambhava) Parva, clx. p. 413. It was the land ruled by Drona, meaning 
the tree-trunk, the parent - tree, the receptacle of the Soma or sap of life, 



1 6 History and Chronology 

and secondly, as Gaudia or Gondwana, the name still used 
in popular speech which was given to it before it was called 
Kosala, the land of the Kushikas. 

These Marya sons of the tree called " marom " in Gondi, 
were the first race who in Southern India carved their 
villages out of the forests. Their father-god was the tree-ape- 
god Maroti, and the guardian who protected them from 
outside ills was the snake, the ring of cultivated land round 
the Sarna. This is still called by the Gonds the holy snake, 
the land consecrated to the boundary snake-god Goraya, 
whose priests the Goraits are wardens of the boundary in 
all Gond villages. 

The original founders of villages did not limit their 
political outlook to securing the permanency of the villages 
by the careful training of the young, and the establishment 
of strong internal government, but they also made the 
maintenance of friendly relations among those dwelling in 
each village, and between all the villages of the confederacy, 
a principal part of their policy. One of the most effective 
group of laws enacted for this purpose were those regulat- 
ing the relations between the sexes. These allowed any man 
in the confederacy to become the father of the child of any 
woman in the Parha except of those of his own village. 
And hence, as it was impossible that under this rule any 
woman could live with the fathers of her children, it was 
necessary to secure the birth of legally begotten offspring 
in each village by arranging for meetings between the men 
and women of neighbouring villages. These were permitted 
at the seasonal dances held in the Akra of each village, and 
it was only at these dances, regulated by the women, that 
children were allowed to be begotten. They used to 
invite the men of the adjoining village to attend these 
dances, as the Ho-Kol and Bhuya women of Chutia 
Nagpore still do, and the children then begotten under 



called in the Satapatha Brahmana, iv. 5, 6, 7 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 410, 
the supreme year god Prajapati. 



of the Myth- Making Age. \y 

the shade of the village grove became the children of the 
village tree. 

These were trained by the village elders and matrons^ 
who were to one another as brothers and sisters, and 
hence arose the great influence accorded in ancient com- 
munities to the maternal uncle. He is in India the family 
priest of such widely distributed castes as the Doms or 
basket-makers, the Dravidian rulers of Oudh x ; the Haris 
or scavengers ; the Kurmis, the leading agricultural caste ; 
the Pasis, guardians of the date palm, whence the palm wine 
is made ; and the Tantis, the weavers 2 . And it was owing 
to the acknowledgement in matriarchal times of parentage 
through the mother and not through the father, that pro- 
perty, when it came to belong to the family and not to the 
community, descended in the female line, as it does among 
the Nairs of Madras. And this line of descent was that 
observed by the Lycians, Cretans, Dorians, Athenians, 
Lemnians, Etruscans, Egyptians, Orchomenians, Locrians, 
Lesbians, Mantineans, Babylonians, and many Asiatic nations, 
as has been proved by Morgan and Bachofen 3. 

The principle lessons taught in the oral instruction of the 
village children were those which told them, from a farmer's 
point of view, of the course of the year and the sequence 
of the seasons. These are the themes of almost all the 
earliest relics of ancient thought which have come down 
to us in folk-tales, such as the stories of the two or three 
brothers or sisters, in which the youngest, the winter child, 
was successful, and of the year tasks done by the final 
conqueror. Most of these refer to the year of three seasons, 
but the earlier year of two seasons appears also among them. 
Also the history of the year and the changes in its reckoning 



1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Doms, p. 240. 

2 Ibid., pp. 245, 316, 532 ; vol. ii. pp. 167, 300. 

3 Morgan, Ancient Society, chap. xiv. pp. 343, 35 1 ; Bachofen, Die 
Mutt err edit ; Sayce, Babylonians and Assyrians, chap. ii. p. 13, ff., where 
he shows that in Sumerian times the woman was the head of the family. 

C 



1 8 History and Chronology 

are the themes forming the plot of all the ancient historical 
epics of India, Persia, and Greece, in which the heroes were, 
in the original forms of the story, astronomical abstractions 
indicating the successive methods of year measurement, 
which in primitive history accompanied each change in the 
ruling race. But the primitive year legend has been in 
Greece transmogrified by the later poets, who had forgotten 
the old mythology. In Persia and India the primitive form 
is much more easily" recognised. Each race, like each 
village, carried its gods with it in its emigrations, and the 
primitive gods were all gods of time who ruled the course 
of the year. It was the farmers of the first settled villages, 
who depended on their crops for their means of subsistence, 
who first impressed on the public mind the absolute necessity 
of an accurate measure of time, and in doing this they only 
intensified a desire which must always have been present 
among the hunting races, who had to consider the changes 
in the seasons which brought about changes in the habits 
of the animals they hunted. 

These forest Dravidians who laid the foundations of civil 
government, and who, as will be explained in Chapter II., 
first measured time by noting the evidence of its movements 
given by the changing position of the stars, were also the 
first people who traversed the sea in boats, for it was only on 
their coasts that ship-building timber grew near the shore 
in the whole circuit of the Indian Ocean. And that the 
people of the earliest stone age in the Southern seas could 
make navigable boats is proved by those used by the now 
extinct Tasmanians, whose flint implements continued down to 
their recent extermination to be of the most primitive type r . 
The sea coasts of North Africa, Arabia, Egypt and Persia 
were totally unwooded, and no good timber grew near the 
sea in any of these countries. It was only the forests of 



1 Professor Tylor, The Stone Age in Tasmania : a Paper read in the 
Anthropological Section of the British Association, Sept. 6, 1900. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 19 

the islands of the Indian Archipelago and of the Malabar 
coast of Western India which were able to furnish timber 
whence boats could be made, and it is with Indian teak 
that the Arabs still build their ships. It was the dwellers 
in these sea-side forests and on the wooded banks of the 
rivers of Western India who first made navigable canoes, 
which they built without the use of metal, as the Polynesian 
islanders and the Dyaks of Borneo still do ; and they must 
have made them as strong and sea-worthy as those now con- 
structed with the same rude stone implements they used. It 
must have been very soon after the first canoes hollowed 
out of a single tree had been launched on the ocean that 
they were used as transports by those who wished to find 
new land for tillage. The damp equatorial forests, through 
which pioneers who did not travel by water had to cut 
their way, were so thick and so encumbered with huge 
creepers that water carriage must have been used almost 
as soon as boats were invented. It was in these that they 
made their way along the coasts of the Indian Ocean till 
they reached the shores of the Persian Gulf, where the 
memory of their arrival has been preserved in the legendary 
history, which tells how civilisation and the arts of building 
and government were brought to the Euphratean Delta 
by the god la, the god of the house (/), of the waters (a), 
who was clothed in fish skins and piloted the mother-ship 
Ma, the constellation Argo ; that is to say, that these early 
mariners steered their course by the stars among which 
Canopus in the constellation Argo was their mother star. 
It is the progress and growth of the societies formed by 
these primitive discoverers of social laws, national religion, 
the art of navigation and the rudiments of astronomy that 
I propose to describe in the present work. And in tracing 
out this history, I will also show that we possess in the 
changes of the Pole Star in the Polar Circle, and in the stars 
of the ecleptic, chronological evidence enabling us to fix 
approximately the date of the period when each change 
in the year's reckoning took place, and by this means to 

C 2 



2C History and Chronology of the Myth-Making Age. 

determine the time when each of the successive races who 
introduced these changes became the rulers first of India, 
Babylonia, Arabia and Egypt, and afterwards of the Mediter- 
ranean territories and the more distant lands of continental 
Europe. 



CHAPTER II. 



The years of two seasons and five-day weeks 
measured by the movements of the pleiades 
and the Solstitial Sun. 

THOUGH the year measured by the Solstices was one 
of the earliest years used by the founders of social life, 
yet it was not that which was first adopted by the Dravidian 
makers of villages. These dwellers in equatorial countries 
hated the sun which burnt up and destroyed their crops, unless 
the evils wrought by its assaults were averted by the frequent 
rains needed by the rice crops which supplied their food. 
To them the star rulers of the night were the messengers 
of a kindlier god than the destroying sun, and it was among 
them that they sought a sign to mark the beginning of the 
equatorial spring of the Southern Hemisphere. This 
they found in the Pleiades, which, as they noted, set im- 
mediately after the sun on the 1st November, when the spring 
began. They continued to set after it at more distant in- 
tervals each evening, till in April their setting was no longer 
visible at night. They reappeared again as evening stars in 
May, when they set before the sun, and this they continued 
to do till the end of October. Thus the primaeval year 
was one of two seasons of six months each, from November 
till the end of April, and May till the end of October. 

This was the year observed in Southern and Western 
India, and still used by the majority of the dwellers in 
the Southern Hemisphere and by the traders of West India. 
Among the latter every merchant closes his year's books 
on the 26th of October and begins his year with the full 
moon of Khartik (October — November), the month dedi- 



22 History and Chronology 

cated to and named after the Pleiades, called the Krittakas 
or Spinners. 

Besides this year there was another year brought to India 
by the Mundas, the earliest emigrants from the North-east. 
They came from the mountains of South China, a colder 
and much more rainy region than South India ; and they, 
instead of dreading the sun as an enemy, looked on the 
winter sun as a kindly mother, whose fiery rays dried and 
warmed the soil chilled and sodden by the constant rains 
of summer and autumn. It was the sun which made their 
land fit for the sowing of the seeds of their winter and spring 
crops, which were originally chiefly millets, the grain called 
Murwa in Bengal, and Raggi in Madras (Eleusine Coracana), 
and another allied species called Gundli in Chutia Nagpore. 
They deified the sun as their national god, and worship 
him under the name of Sri Bonga. This god was symbo- 
lised on earth by the sun-bird, the wild jungle-fowl, the 
parent of our domestic poultry. In their belief it began 
its annual course round the heavens and the central Pole 
when the sun set in the South-west at the winter solstice. 
Thence it went northward, reaching its most northerly point 
at the summer solstice, whence it came southwards to its 
winter home. This is the year still regarded as the orthodox 
year of Hindu Brahminical ritual. It is divided like that 
of the Pleiades into two periods of six months each : the 
first six months from the winter to the summer solstice 
being called Devayana or times {aydna) of the gods, and 
the six months of the returning sun ending with the winter 
solstice are the Pitri-yana or times {aydna) of the fathers. 
This is the year ruled by the Vedic god Tvashtar, the creator, 
the most ancient god in the Hindu Pantheon, who shows 
in his name beginning with the superlative form of tva, two 
(tvas/i), that he is the ruling god of the most holy of the 
two years measured by two seasons. The existence of the 
first year, that of the Pleiades, is, however, recognised 
in the Hindu system of months, for the name of the month 
Vi-sakha (April — May), which is the mid month of the 



of the Myth-Making Age. 23 

Pleiades year, means the month of two (vi) branches 
(sakha), thus recording the original bifurcation of the 
year in the middle of this month. 

A. Birth of life from the Mother Tree. 

But the division of time into periods measured by months 
was only made comprehensible to the popular intellect after 
a long period of national education, and the first time-unit 
used as a fraction of the year was that which marked the 
weeks. The first week was one of five days, or rather 
five nights, for the equatorial day of the Pleiades year 
began at sunset at six o'clock in the evening, and the 
reason for the adoption of this time-unit is to be found 
in the fundamental assumptions of their infant astronomy. 
They based all their calculations of time measurement 
on their adoption of the conclusion that the setting, rising, 
and culmination of the stars, the sun, and the moon, proved 
that they all described a daily circle in the heavens round 
a central point marked by the North Pole Star. The reason 
which they gave to account for this revolution of the 
heavenly bodies is most clearly set forth in a story pre- 
served by the Australian aborigines x . It tells how Gneeang- 
ger, the Queen of the Pleiades, the star Aldebaran, found 
a grub in a tree, that is in the magic tree of the sacred part 
of the forest set apart for the national ceremonies performed 
by the tribal priest, and near the corroboree dancing 
ground, answering to the Akra, placed in the Hindu village 
under the shade of the Sarna or central grove. This grub, 
the chrysalis of the raven parent god of the tribe, she took 
out and it became the giant raven star Canopus, who ran 
away with her, that is to say dragged her, her attendant 
stars the Pleiades, and the rest of the starry host round 
the Pole. 

This raven star of this Australian story became, in the 
Hindu mythology, Agastya, the star Canopus, whose name 

1 Elworthy, The Evil Eye, Appendix iii. p. 438. 



24 History and Chronology 

means the singer {go), the leader of the harmony of the 
spheres. He appears in his raven form in Rg. ii. 43, 1, 2, 
where the holy raven (Shakuni) is said to sing the divine 
songs of the ritual in the sacred metres which, as we shall 
see, represent in the varying numbers of their syllables 
the successive changes in the measurements of ritualistic 
time. It is this life-giving raven gifted with the amrita 
or water of life, which in the historical Gond poem of the 
Song of the Lingal restores Lingal, the rain - father god, 
to life after he had been slain by the first race of Gonds, 
the race from the North-east, whom he had settled on 
the land. The conception of the raven star was based on 
the black rain -cloud which brought up the rains of the 
South-west and North-east monsoons, and it was the 
wind which preceded these annual rains which was first 
believed to drive the stars round the Pole. 

But side by side with and anterior in time to this con- 
ception there grew up another, founded on the belief in 
the origin of life from the central mother-tree of the South 
in which the Canopus grub was found. As there was no 
Pole Star visible in the Southern heavens, the region of 
the South was looked on as a dark waste of waters within 
which dwelt the unseen South Pole goddess, the awful 
and mysterious mother of living things. She was adored 
by the Akkadians as Bahu, the Baau of the Phoenicians, 
the Bohu or waste void of Genesis i. 2. She was called 
" the mother who has begotten the black-headed Akka- 
dians *, the sons of the father la, the god of the house (/), 
of the waters (a), whose home is in the North Pole Star. 5 ' 
Also as Gula, the Great One, she is called " the wife of 
the Southern Sun." In another form of her mythic history 
she is the great serpent goddess of the deep called Tiamat, 
the mother of living things (tia), the goddess who sur- 
rounded and guarded the mother-tree of the Southern 
world, as the holy boundary- snake is believed in Hindu 

1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 262 — 264. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 25 

mythology to guard the village with the Sarna in its centre. 
She was in this form the winged snake goddess destroyed by 
Marduk, or Bel Merodach, the sun calf (marduk), when 
the sun-god of day became the ruler of the year instead 
of the stars of night in the lunar solar epoch succeeding 
the sidereal Pole Star age. And this mother abyss of waters 
was symbolised in the latest Semitic ritual in the brazen 
seas or abysses (absu), which were first pools of water and 
afterwards brazen basins, which were placed in the southern 
outer courts of the Babylonian temples, and reproduced 
in Jewish ritual J . 

The tree mother born from this abyss of waters is in 
the Zend historical mythology the Gao-kerena, Gokard 
or White Horn tree, growing according to the Dinkard, 
the epitome of the lost Nasks, in " deep mud of the wide- 
formed ocean," the sea Vouru-kasha, or the Indian Ocean 2 . 
This tree, with its roots in the Southern sea, grew up on 
earth on the banks of the river Daitya, the river of the 
serpents or parent snakes. This was the river Kur or 
Araxes, rising in Mt. Ararat and falling into the Caspian 
sea. On this tree was the nest of the Horn birds 3. These 
are the mother ravens, the birds of the night and the day, 
who, in Rg. i. 164, 20-22, "sit on this tree whence all things 
grow and which knows no father, the day bird eating its 
fruits and the night bird guarding it in silence." They 
are the birds who watch over the Zend Haoma, the Hindu 
Soma, the sap of life. Haoma and Soma are derived from the 
roots Hu and Su, both of which are dialectic forms of Khu, 

1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i., p. 63; Hewitt, Ruling Races 
of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 188, 189, with plan of Sabaean 
temple ; 1 Kings vii. 39 ; 2 Chron. iv. 10, where the brazen sea is placed 
to the South-east. 

2 West, Dinkard, vii. 29 ; West, Bundahish, xviii. 1 ; Darmesteter, 
Zendavesta Vendiddd Fargard, xx. 4; S.B.E., xlvii. p. 25; vol. v. p. 65; 
iv. p. 221 ; Introduction, iv. 28; lxiv. 

3 Dinkard, vii. 26 — 36 ; Bundahish, xx. 13 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendiddd 
Fargard, i. 3; S.B.E., vol. xlvii. pp. 24 — 26; v. p. 79, note I; iv. p. 5, 
notes 2 and 3. 



26 History and Chronology 

the mother-bird of the Akkadians and Egyptians, who 
was originally the bird of the raven-star nest Argo. It 
was from " the water and vegetation " supplied by this 
tree that the great 'Zend prophet, Zarathustra, was born 
as the sun-hawk, Karshipta, who spoke the Avesta in 
the language of birds r . 

In the Hindu form of the mythological history of this 
tree of life it had its roots in the ocean, and grew up on 
earth in the centre of the holy land of Kurukshetra, the 
land (Kshethra) of the Kurus, the sons of the river Kur 
of the Zend legend, who had come to India from Atar5 
Patakan, the modern Adarbaijan, the mother land of the 
fire-worshippers traversed by the Kur. The line of its growth 
passed, as Alberuni tells us, through the course of the river 
Yamuna or Jumna, instead of the Zend Euphrates leading 
to the river Kur. Thence to the plain of Taneshur 2 , that 
is of the god {esJiwar) Tan, the father of the primaeval Hindu 
race called the Danava, the sons of Danu, whom Indra slew. 
This, with its 360 shrines representing the 360 days of 
the year 3 ; was the traditional birth-place of the Kurus 
or Kaurs, the Kauravya of the Mahabharata born in India 
from this world's mother-tree, the great Banyan tree {Ficus 
Indica), the Sanskrit Nigrodha tree, the tree of their father 
Kashyapa or Kassapa4. This tree stood on the banks 
of the central lake, reproducing the southern mother sea 
traversed by the mother ship constellation Argo. This was 
the lake called in Rg. i. 84, 13, 14, Sharyanavan, the ship 
(navan) of the year arrow [sharyd) or the mother reed 
(skarya), whence the Kushika or Kurus were born as the 
sons of the rivers. It was on this lake lying below the 
Himalaya mountains, the home of the North Pole Star, that 

1 West, Dinkard, vii. 36; West, Bundahisk, xxiv. 11 ; xix. 16; Dar- 
mesteter, Zendavesta Vendidad Fargard, ii. 42, 43; S.B.E. , vol. xlvii. 
p. 26 ; v. pp. 89, 70 ; iv. p. 21. 

2 Sachau, Alberunl's India, chap. xxxi. vol. i. p. 316. 

3 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, p. 332. 

4 Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories ; The Nidanakathd, p. 5I4 



of the Myth- Making Age. 27 

Indra found the head of the sun-horse Dadhyank, which, 
as we shall see in Chapter VI., was the ruler of the 
eleven months year. 

The Danava predecessors of the Kurus, sons of Dan or 
Tan, were the equivalents of the Hebrew Tannlm, the 
Arabic Tinnim, called in the Bible the dragons or snakes 
of the deep I , the Greek Ti-tans 2 , or sons of the mud {tan, 
Arab tin) of life (ti), who were called by the Greeks children 
of Uranos and Gaia, heaven and earth. This is an accurate 
reproduction of the primitive genealogy, for Uranos is the 
Greek form of the Sanskrit Varuna, from the root vri, to 
cover, and hence Varuna is the god of the covering rain- 
cloud, the var reproduced in the Sanskrit Varsha, the 
Hindu Barsah, and the Zend Bares, all meaning rain, 
that is the productive seed of the original supreme god 
of the first villagers, the rain-god, which impregnated the 
earth with life. In the description of the four heavenly 
regions ruled by the gods called Lokapalas, or guardians 
of space, Varuna is the third Lokapala ruling the north 
heaven, whose palace is built in the waters whence all the 
rivers of India descend to fill the Southern Ocean 3. It is 
this rain descending in the rivers from the home of this god 
of the north which is the father of the children of men and 
animals produced from the nourishing fruit of the mother- 
tree, the offspring of the southern impregnated earth or mud, 
which conveys the life derived from the productive rain 
to all who sustain life by the fruit of the tree its daughter. 
This mud mother, Tan or Tin, of the Greek Titans is the 
primitive form of the goddess Thetis, whose name is de- 
rived from the Phcenician Thith, the mud 4. It was she 
who with Euronyme, the guardian goddess of the North, the 
Phcenician Astro Noema, first the Pole Star and afterwards 



1 Ps. cxlviii. 7. 

2 Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadieus, pp. 230, 231. 

3 Mahabharata Sabha {Lokapala Sabhakhyand) Parva, ix. pp. 28- 

4 Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 212. 



28 History and Chronology 

the Star Virgo, the mother of corn, received Hephaistos, the 
god of the fire-drill of heaven, the smith-producer of fire, 
when thrown from heaven by Zeus x . This southern mud- 
mother-goddess, when wedded to Peleus, the northern god 
of the potter's clay {trrfKos), became mother of the sun-god 
Achilles, whom she placed in the southern fire, the home 
of the earth's heat, after his birth, just as Purushaspa, Za- 
rathustra's father, placed his newly-born son, begotten from 
the mother-tree and the southern mud, in the same fire, 
whence he was removed at dawn by his mother and arose 
as the sun-god, to bring heat and light to the earth 2 . 
Achilles was the sun-god of the race of the Myrmidons or 
ants, the sons of the red earth, the Adamite race who suc- 
ceeded the sons of the southern mother-tree, and who 
believed that man was formed from the dust of the earth 
moulded by the Divine Potter, the Pole Star god, who 
turned the potter's wheel of the revolving earth. In this 
later conception the earth was the revolving plain turn- 
ing on its axis 3, whereas in the earlier historical imagery 
it was the earth which stood still while the heavens, drawn 
by the hand of the ape-god Canopus, revolved. 

This southern mother-tree was the origin of the trees which 
have been looked on as parent trees by so many primi- 
tive people. The Sal-tree (Shorea robustd) of the Indian 
Mons or Mundas, the oak tree of the Druids and of Dodona, 
the central parent tree of the Volsungs in the Niblunga 
Saga, the race of woodlanders (voir) from whom was born 
the sun-god Sigurd, the god of the pillar (urdr) of victory 



1 Homer, Iliad, xviii., 394—411; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, 
pp. 97, 151, 183. 

2 West, Dinkard, vii. 8 — 10; S.B.E., vol. xlvii. pp. 36, 37. 

3 This is the conception of the earth entertained by the Malays who believe 
that " the world is of an oval shape revolving on its own axis four times 
in the space of one year." They also believe in the tree-mother of life, the 
world's tree, Pauh Janggi, growing in the mud of the Southern Ocean, and 
produced from the seed Kun created by God and conveyed in the rain. 
Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 5, 6, 8 — 10, 4. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 29 

(szg), the sun gnomon stone r . The fig-trees of the Syrians 
and the Indian Kauravya or Kushika, the almond or nut- 
tree of the Jews, the budding almond-rod of Aaron 2 , the 
date-palm-tree of Babylonia and of the Indian sun-god 
Bhishma and the moon-god Valarama 3, the peach-tree of 
China, the pine-tree of Germany and Asia Minor, the ash- 
tree, the Ygg-drasil of the Edda, and the cypress-tree of 
the Phoenicians. It was this last tree which was especially 
connected with the worship of the god Tan, who from 
being the mother mud of the South became, when the father 
succeeded the mother as the recognised parent, the god Tan 
or Danu of the North Pole. 

It is in this form that he appeared as the Cretan Zeus, 
called I-tan-os or the god Tan, a name which survives in 
Ztjuos, Doric Zdvos, the Genitive of the Greek Zeus, for d, 
t, and z are interchangeable letters, as we see in the various 
names of the god of life, Zi, di, and ti. It is in the Creto- 
Phcenician cult of the god I-tan-os, the reproduction 
of the Akkadian I-tan-a, the house of Tan, that we find 
the worship of Brito-martis the virgin (niczrtis) cypress- 
tree (berut), who became mother of the sun-god the Phoe- 
nician Adonis or the master (adon), the Hebrew Tammuz, 
the Akkadian Dumu-zi, the son (dumu) of life (zi), who is 
represented as born from the cypress -tree on the Palmy- 
rene altar at Rome 4. The Akkadian story of the birth 
of Dumu-zi from the mother - tree is told in a bilingual 
hymn quoted by Dr. Sayce. This represents the mother- 
tree as growing in the " centre of the earth," in the " holy 
place " or village grove of Eridu or Eriduga, the holy 
{dugd) city (erz), the most ancient port at the mouth of 
the Euphrates, where the God la disembarked from the con- 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., p. III. 

2 Numbers xvii. 9. 

3 Mahabharata Bhishma (Bhishma- Vadha) Parva, xlvii. p. 165; Shaleya 
(Gud-Ayudha), Parva, xxxiv., lx. pp. 135, 233. 

4 Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 281, 300 ; D'Alviella, The 
Migration of Symbols, p. 142. 



30 History and Chronology 

stellation ship Ma or Argo. In its " foliage was the couch 
of Zi-kum," the mother of life (si), the nest of the mother 
bird, and into the heart of " its holy house no man hath 
entered." "In the midst of it was Dumuzi," the son (dumu) 
of life (.57), born like his counterpart the sun-hawk Zarathus- 
tra from the water and vegetation supplied to this world's 
tree from the Southern mother Ocean 1 . This story of the 
birth of the sun-god from the tree is also reproduced, as 
Professor Douglas informs me, in the Chinese characters, 
which were originally derived, as Mr. Ball has proved, 
from Akkadian originals 2 . The Chinese character for 



the sun is |33 This is formed of the two elements H— 

tree, and l^j sun, while the triangle forming the base of 
the character for tree /JV is the sign for woman, used in 
the oldest form of the Akkadian script, that on the 
monuments at Girsu. So that the Chinese in their written 
speech say as plainly as possible that the sun is born 
from the mother-roots of the tree, that is the tree of life. 
It is from these three roots that the Yggdrasil of the Edda 
springs, and it draws its life-giving sap from the sources 
whence the roots spring, the giant's well Mimir, the Urdar 
fountain of Nifiheim, the home of mist, the under-world, 
and the dwelling of the .#Csir, the home of the soul and 
essence of life 3. This birth of the Akkadian Dumuzi from 
the parent tree, is reproduced in India in the account of 
the birth of the sun-god, the Buddha, which I will deal 
with more fully afterwards in Chapter VII. Here I will 
only point out that the Buddha was conceived under the 
Great Sal tree on the Crimson plain of the dawning sun 
in the Himalayas. That there the god Gan-isha with the 
elephant's trunk, the god of the rain-cloud, entered on her 

1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv., p. 238. 

2 Transactions of the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists. The 
Akkadian Affinities of Chinese, by the Rev. C.J. Ball, M.A., § viii. ; China, 
Central Asia, and the Far East, p. 677, ff. 

3 Mallet, Northern Antiquities : The Prose Edda, p. 411. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 3 1 

right side the womb of his mother Maya, the witch mother 
Magha bearing the divine rod of power, the rain-compel- 
ling branch of the mother-tree. He was born from his 
mother when she stood and grasped the Sal tree in the 
village grove between Kapilavastu and Koliya, the village 
of the Munda or Kol race to which his mother belonged, 
that is to say he was like Dumu-zi, the son of the Sal tree r , 
and a rain-shower fell at his birth *. 

All these origin tree-mothers find their prototype in the 
Dravidian mother - tree goddess Mari-amma, the mother 
(amma), Mari the tree (marom). She is the only goddess 
in the Hindu pantheon whose image is always made of 
wood. It is she who, in the story telling of the founding 
of the great temple of Jagahnath in Orissa, was the mother 
goddess of the primaeval temple, a yojana beneath the 
surface of the earth. This was shown to the founder 
of the later temple, King Indramena, the god Indra, by 
the mother crow or raven who had grown white with age. 
It was from these submerged foundations of the early ritual, 
the depths of the Southern Sea, that the earliest form of the 
year god, Krishna or Vishnu, was sent by divine power 
as a log on the sea-shore, and this log, the timber of the 
virgin mother-tree, is now the image of the year-god in 
the temple of the Lord (nath) of Space {Jagah) 2 . 

This is the goddess of the Palladium or guardian wooden 
image kept in the treasure-house of ancient cities. The 
classical prototype of this image is the Palladium of Troy, 
made of the mother wild fig-tree of the Trojan race growing 
in the tomb of Ilos, the founder of the city 3. This goddess, 
called Pallas, became the tree-mother of the Ionian race, 
the goddess Athene, the tree-mother of the olive-tree and 
earlier sacred oil plant, the Sesame (Sesamum orientate), 
the mother of the Indian Telis, or oil dealers, of whom 

1 Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories : The Nidanakalha , pp. 62, 63, 66, 67. 
- Beauchamp, Dubois' Hindu Manners, Customs, and Cere?no?iies, vol. ii, 
p. 589, App. v. pp. 714—719. 
3 Homer, Iliad, xi. 167. 



32 History and Chronology 

I shall give a full account in Chapter VI., when describing 
the eleven months year. She, as the mother-tree of the 
primaeval year, was the earthly representative of the stellar 
year-mother the Pleiades, and it is to this constellation as 
her heavenly counterpart that her earliest temple at Athens 
was oriented r . She, who was born from the head of 
Zeus, who was, as I have shown, the mother mud goddess 
Tan, and who was therefore the counterpart of her parent, 
appears in the form of the goddess Tan in the historical 
genealogy of the Boeotians, the chief agricultural people in 
ancient Greece. Their legendary history tells us that they 
arrived in Greece as emigrants from Asia Minor under 
Kadmus, the man of the East (Kedem), the introducer of 
the plough. He killed the snake parent of the original 
dwellers in the land, and from the land ploughed by him, 
and sown with the snake's teeth, there were born the five 
Spartos, or sown (o-7reipa>) men, the five days of the week, 
who became ancestors of all the Boeotians. In other words, 
this story tells how a tribe of agriculturists from Asia Minor, 
who measured time by five-day weeks, came to Boeotia 
and occupied the country, allying themselves with the 
primitive villagers, the Achaioi, or sons of the snake Echis, 
the Ahi of the Rigveda, the Indian sons of the village tree. 
At the place where Kadmus rested on his journey from 
Delphi to Thebes, just outside the Ogygian gate of the 
city 2 , he set up an image of Athene, called by what Pausanias 
tells us was the Phoenician name of Onga 3. This name 
means, according to Movers, the burning or heated goddess 4. 
That is to say, she was originally the goddess of the heated 
south, the underground fire of the earth, the mud-mother- 
goddess Tan, and in this form she was worshipped as the 

1 Norman Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, p. 419. He, p. 312, traces speci- 
fically the Orientation of temple sites to stars to 6400 B.C. It may have 
begun much earlier. 

2 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 48. 

3 Ibid., ix. 12, 2, vol. i. p. 459, vol. v. p. 48. 
* Movers, Die Pho?iizier, i. p. 643, 



of the Myth- Making Age. 33 

goddess called by Pausanias the Itonian Athene. She was 
the goddess to whom was consecrated the land near Coronea, 
where the Boeotians held their annual national year festival, 
and the name is, as Pausanias tells us r , derived from Itonus, 
who was the husband of Melanippe, the black {inelan) 
horse (Juppe) mother of night, a name of Demeter, who 
was, as we shall see, the mother-goddess of the Pleiades 
year beginning in November. Their son was Bceotus, from 
whom the Boeotians got their name of the people of the 
ploughing ox (fiovs). Thus the Boeotians were the sons 
of the dark mother of night, the goddess of the southern 
abyss of waters and of Itonus. Itonus is a variant form 
of I-tan-os, and a very frequent type among the ancient 
coins of Crete represents the god Itanos on one side with 
a fish's tail, holding the trident, and on the other side he 
appears as the great ocean fish Tan with his wife, who 
is also a fish 2 . She is the fish goddess of Syria, called 
Derceto, or Atergatis, names shown by Movers to be 
variant forms of Tirhatha, meaning the abyss 3, the mud- 
goddess Tan under the form of the mud-born fish. These 
fish born from the mud are those so frequently seen in 
India, who appear in the tanks which had been dry mud 
in summer as soon as they are filled by the rains. They 
hybernate in the mud, and hence they are regarded as 
the mud-born mothers of life, and the representative of 
these fish, the carp, Rohu, is worshipped in India as the 
sun-fish, and guarded and fed in the sacred tanks. 

At Coronea the statue of the Itonian Athene is ac- 
companied by that of the god called by Pausanias ix. 
34, 1, Zeus, but who is said by Strabo to be Hades, the 
god of the Southern Ocean, the abysmal home of the winter 
sun 4. It was at the shrine consecrated to the god Tan 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 34, 1, vol. i. p. 486. 

2 R. Brown, jun., Primitive Constellations, vol. i. chap. v. p. 188. 

3 Lucien, De Ded Syrid, 14 ; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 98 ; 
Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. p, 594. 

4 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 169. 

P 



34 History and Chronology 

that the Boeotians celebrated the beginning of their year 
at a festival held in September— October, the tenth month 
of the year beginning at the winter solstice. Thus their year 
began, like that of the Jews, with the autumnal equinox \ 
But this year and the present year of the Sabsans beginning 
at the same time is one which, like the similar year of the 
Indian Pitaro Barishadah, the Kushika ancestors, has been 
changed, as I have shown in Chapters IV. and V., from 
a year which originally began in November with a feast 
to the dead, which has been transferred to the autumnal 
equinox. 

This tree-goddess of the mud, Tan, also appears in the 
Roman Diana, the female Janus, the Etruscan Tana. She, 
the mother of witchcraft, is the goddess of the groves, the 
most celebrated of those sacred to her being the grove of 
Aricia, that on the x\ventine, and in the Vicus Patricius 
at Rome, into the last of which no man might enter. Her 
festival and that of her male counterpart, called Virbius 
in Aricia and Vertumnus or the turner (yerto) of the year 
at Rome, was held on the Ides the 13th of August, and like 
the Panathenaia at Athens, held on the 15th of August, 
it denoted the mid-day of a year beginning in January — 
February, the year of the sun-god Lug, which will be 
described in Chapter VII. But the year which was sacred 
to Diana as the moon-goddess, to whom cakes of meal, wine, 
salt and honey, shaped like a crescent-moon, were offered, 
was a reproduction of the original year of the tree-mother, 
beginning in November with its mid-year feast on the 1st 
of May. In this year she was the returning tree-goddess 
Persephone, the unwed goddess of the tree and food-bearing 
plants impregnated with life by the father rain-god below 
the earth. At these mid-year May feasts she was wor- 
shipped by votaries as naked as the first of human beings, 
and these are the feasts to Tana or Diana as described 



1 Fraser. Pausanias. vol. v. p. 169. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 35 

in the gospel of the witches, which Mr. Leland has unearthed 
in Tuscany. The materials of the feast were cakes of meal 
salt, honey and water, and in preparing them the meal was 
invoked in a hymn which embodies in its first lines the 
ancient creed of the birth of all life from the seed of the 
mother plant. The lines are as follows : — 

Translation. 

Scongiuro te, O farina, I conjure thee, O meal, who art 

Che sei il corpo nostra — senza our body. Without thee we could 

di te not live. Thou who before be- 

Non si potrebbe vivere — tu che coming meal wert placed (as the 

Prima di devenire la farina seed) below the earth, whence all 

Sei stata sotto terra dove tutti things are born in secret. 
Sono nascosti tutti in segreti. 

The feasts on these cakes were accompanied by large 
draughts of wine, and the orgies of these festivals of the 
dancing witches and wizards are shown by the instructions 
in Mr. Leland's manual to have exactly resembled the 
matriarchal seasonal festivals of the primitive Indian races. 
They are bidden " to sit down to supper, all naked, men and 
women, and the feast over they shall sing, dance, make 
music, and then love in the darkness with all the lights 
extinguished I ." 

In the Hindu form of the myth of the mother-tree, 
reaching from the Southern Ocean to the North Pole Star, 
the tenant of the tree and its first-born son is the Gond 
ape-god Maroti, the tree {inaroni) ape. He, in his original 
form, was the female mother-ape, called in Rg. x. 86, 
Vrisha-kapi, the rain (vrisha) ape wife of Indra the rain-god, 
the ape mother impregnated with the seed of life by the 
heaven-sent rain. She is the ape rock ogress of the 
Thibetan Muni kabum, who became in the form of an ape 
the mother of the six sons of the ape-father-god Bodhisatva, 
king of the monkeys, who was the offspring of Shenrazig 

1 Leland, Arcadia, or the Gospel of Witches, chap, ii., The Sabbat, pp. 
8 — 14 ; Diana, Encyclopedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, vol. viii. p. 167 ; 
W. Warde Fowler,, The Roman Festivals ; Mcnsis Sextilis, pp. 198 ff : 

D 2 



3 r ) History and Chronology 

Wungch'yuk, the visible light, the Pole Star god, and the 
goddess Drolma, born of the tears of his right eye, the mother 
rain-cloud *. The ape-mother-goddess became in the evolu- 
tion of belief from south to north the Finn Pole Star 
goddess Taara, the Tari Pennu or female {pen) Tara wor- 
shipped in Eastern India by the Kandhs of Oressa and all 
the superior agricultural tribes of Bengal and Behar. She 
represents the Finn immigration, which made its way into 
India after the Mundas or mountaineers. They were people 
of the same stock as the Ugro Finn Akkadians, who ruled 
the Euphratean countries before the Semites, and who 
introduced both into Mesopotamia and India the same 
system of magic and witchcraft which they still practise 
in their original homes in the north. It was this Finn 
element which has made Central India, and especially 
Chutia Nagpore, the country still looked on as the home 
of wizardry and of dealings with evil spirits. 

B. Date of the belief in the Pole Star parent-god. 

Hiouen Tsiang describes the statue of Tara at Tiladaka 
in Maghada as one of a triad with the Buddha in the centre. 
She stood on his left, and their offspring Avalokitesvara, 
meaning the visible (avalokita) Buddha, on his right 2 . She, 
in the story of Rama and Sita, is the Pole Star goddess, 
first the wife of Vali the circling {vri) god, the leading star- 
god going round the Pole, and after his death, when slain 
by Rama, she was wedded to Su-griva, the ape with the 
neck (griva) of Su the bird, the bird-headed ape who had his 
nest in the Pole Star tree 3. It was he and his brother 
Hanuman, the son of Pavana the wind, who were the year 
gods who built the bridge of 360,000 apes, or 360 days 

1 Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, app. vi. pp. 355 ff., 326 ff. ; Muni 
Kabum, Bk. ii. 

2 Beal, 'Records of the Western World? Hiotien Tsiang 's Travels, bk. viii., 
vol. ii. p. 103. 

3 Makabharata Vana (Draupadi-harana) Parva, cclxxix. pp. 822 ff. 



of tJie Myth-Making Age. 37 

of the year, by which Rama reached the island of Lanka 
(Ceylon), the home of the southern sun, where Sita was 
confined by her ravisher the ten-headed Ravana, the god 
of the cycle year of three years described in Chapter V. 
This story of the wedding of the Pole Star ape-mother 
to the bird-headed ape Su-griva gives us a reliable date 
for an early stage of this legendary history. The assignment 
of the nest of the bird-headed ape as the dwelling-place 
of the Pole marks the age of the origin of the tale as that 
when the Pole Star was in the constellation of the tree-ape. 
This is the constellation Kepheus, a Greek form of the 
Indian Kapi, the Greek Kepos, the Latin Cebus, all meaning 
the ape. This name of the constellation has been derived 
by Mr. R. Brown from 'the Phoenician Keph, a stone, the 
Cephas of the Bible, the divine stone Baitulos (Sem. Beth-el) 
of Sanchoniathon, brother of Atlas or Atel, darkness 1 . He 
shows, on the authority of Achilleus Tatius 2 , that it was not 
under that name a Babylonian or Egyptian constellation, 
but quotes Lenormant, Les Origines I. 573, 574, to prove that 
this constellation of the Divine Stone was that consecrated 
to the Phoenician god Baal of Katsia on the Promontory that 
is Mount Kasios, on which stood the temple of Baal Tsephon, 
the god of the north, that is the Pole Star god called Zeus 
Kasios on bronze coins of Seleukia, on which he is depicted 
as a conical stone. This Zeus, called Kassia in Aramaic 
inscriptions, according to Pherecydes slew Typhon, Tsephon 
or Zaphon, that is to say supplanted his rule and appro- 
priated his shrine. Thus the ousted god Tsephon is the 
Greek TyphSn, our typhoon, the god of the storm wind, that 
is to say he is the god of the death-dealing hot south-west 
winds which blow from the middle of June, the beginning 
of the Syriac month Cherizon, meaning the pig (June — July), 



1 R. Brown, jun,, F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. i. p. 30; 'The 
Origin of Ancient Northern Constellation Figures.' Journal Royal Asiatic 
Society, 1897, pp. 217—219.' 

* Achilles, Tatius Eisagoge, xxxix. 



38 History and Chronology 

to the middle of September x . When we consider this 

evidence and that I will now adduce from Egyptian sources, 

it will be clear that Mr. Brown's proofs of the worship of 

Kepheus as the constellation of the stone of light are really 

consistent with the fact that the god of the stone was first 

the ape-god. He was a Phoenician god, and the Egyptian 

name of Phoenicia was Keft, and in an inscription in the 

temple of Edfu the eight apes who sing the praises of Ra 

are four Keftenu or Phoenician and four Uetenu or apes from 

the green (uet) land of India, the only country on the shores 

of the Indian Ocean where the coasts are green 2 . The 

Keftenu appear in Syrian history as the Kaphtorim or 

Philistines, said in I Samuel vi. 17 to be ruled by five lords 

or axles {seranim) the five days of their week. They are 

called in Genesis x. 14 sons of Misraim, a dual name 

indicating the northern and southern races of Egypt, sons 

of the ape Hapi or Kapi, the star Canopus, and of the 

barley-god of the North, Osiris or Orion. They are said in 

Amos ix. 7 to have come from the land of Kaphtor, called 

in Jeremiah xlvii. 4 the isles of Kaphtor, and in Deuteronomy 

ii. 23 they are said to have come to Syria from Kaphtor 

after the Avvim who dwelt in villages, the first communal 

villages on the Indian model founded by the Rephaim, who 

were, as I show in Chapter III., p. yy, the sons of Repha, 

the star Canopus. This land of Kaphtor is clearly the 

southern land of Kapi the ape, whence, as I shall show, the 

Phoenician Tursena, the Indian Turvasu, came from the island 

of Turos in the Persian Gulf 3. The Egyptian Pole Star god 

is the ape-god Seb or Hapi, a form of Kapi, who sits on the 

top of the world's tree with his Thigh, the name of the Great 

Bear in Egyptian astronomy^ pointing to the Pole Star 

his head, and thence he turns the stars round the Pole. 

1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. p. 224. 

2 Brugsch, Religion und My 'thologie der Alien ^gyfiter, p. 152. 

3 Smith, ' Philistines,' Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. xviii. pp. 755 — 757- 

4 Budge, Book of the Dead, chap. xcix. p. 158, where the Great Bear is 
called the Thigh of Hapi. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 39 

Hence his head is called Keph, the Greek Kephale, the Latin 
caput, as the head of the ape Kapi. These conclusions are 
corroborated in Akkadian and Arabian astronomy. In the 
former Kepheus was called Ua-lu-zun, the numerous flock I , 
and in the latter Al Aghnan, the sheep led by 7 Kepheus 
the Pole Star in 19,000 B.C., called Ar-rai, the shepherd 2 . 
This shepherd was the guardian ape, the Pole Star god. 
The whole evidence proves conclusively that the Pole Star 
was watched in India from 21,000 B.C., when it was first 
a star in Kepheus, and that a record of the changing Pole 
Stars was kept and registered by all the nations living round 
the Indian Ocean, and in Syria and Egypt, and that it was 
this national record which preserved to later ages the 
memory of the remote time when a and 7 Kepheus were 
the Pole Star head of the ape, the watcher of the heavenly 
flock. It is as a member of this flock intimately connected 
with Kepheus, that Kassiopsea, his Greek wife, is called 
in Welsh Lys Don, the Court of Don, or the Pole Star 
goddess Danu, mother of the Celtic Tuatha de Danann, the 
tribes of the goddess Danu 3. 

The primaeval history of the marriage of the Pole Star 
with the bird-headed ape passed from India to Egypt, where 
it was reproduced in the account of the birth of Horus, the 
bird-headed sun-god. He, whose second son is Hapi the 
ape, is depicted on the walls of the temple of the Virgin 
Mother Hat-hor, the house {hat) of Hor, as issuing from her 
womb 4. And she is shown by the orientation of the temple 
to be the star goddess Dubha a in the Great Bear, which 
was about 5000 B.C. the nearest rising and setting star to the 
North Pole, the home of the Pole Star goddess to whom 



1 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. p. 20. 
- Hyde, Hist. Rel.,Pers. Edition, 1760, pp. 128, 129 ; Smith, Celestial Cycle, 
ii. p. 500. 

3 Professor Rhys' Address to the Mythological Section of the Folkloie 
Congress of 1891. Papers and Transactions of the Congress, p. 14S. 

4 Marsham Adams, The Books of the Master, chap, vi., The Temple of the 
Virgin Mother, pp. 6j — 72. 



40 History and Chronology 

the temple was dedicated. The original foundation of her 
temple at Denderah, which was rebuilt by Pepi the second 
about 3400 B.C., dates, according to an inscription by 
Thothmes III., from the time of the Hor-shesu, or sons of 
Hor, before 5000 B.C., as the plan of Pepi's temple was drawn 
on " a leathern roll of their era found by Pepi in a brick 
wall on the south side of the temple I ." 

In this historical year drama in which the wind-driven 
rain-cloud became the raven-star Canopus, called also the 
wind-ape Hanuman or Agastiya, the Pleiades and her 
attendant stars were thought to be dragged round the Pole 
Star in their daily and annual circuits by the five fingers of 
the mighty hand of the raven-headed ape-god, the five days 
of the week. This year leader, Agastiya or Hanuman, has 
been looked on by all the natives of Southern India from 
time immemorial as the traditional father of the three 
Dasyas, or country (desk) born tribes, who have successively 
ruled the land 2 . These are (1) the Cholas or Kolas, the 
Munda, Mon or Malli mountaineers from the North - east, 
united with the primitive forest Dravidians ; (2) the Cheroos 
or Northern sons of the bird {chir, cJiiryd), the Ugro Finn 
races allied to the Akkadians of the Euphrates valley; 
and (3) the Pandyas or fair (pandtt) men, the later corn- 
growing sons of the Syrian fig - tree. Their father-star 
Canopus controls the tides in Hindu astronomy by drinking 
up the waters of the ocean, a function assigned in the Zen- 
davesta to the constellation Argo, called Sata-vaesa, or the 
hundred {satd) creators, in which Canopus is the chief 
star 3. 

1 Norman Lockyer, Dawn of 'Astronomy, chap, xx., The Date of the Temple, 
pp. 204 — 207. 

2 Mahabharata Vana {Tirtha Yatra) Parva, xcix. p. 314. 

3 West, Bundahish, ii. 7, xiii. 12; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendidad Fclr- 
gard, v. 18, 19; S.B.E., vol. v. pp. 12, 44, iv. p. 54; Mahabharata Vana 
( Tirtha- Yatra) Parva, ccii. — ccix. pp. 324 — 340 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Pre- 
historic Times, vol. i., Essay iii. p. 257. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 4 1 

C. The original week of five days. 

As the star leaders of the primitive year were always 
setting not rising stars, the weeks measured by the five 
fingers of the ape father -star were measured by nights 
and not by days. This reckoning by nights was that 
used, as Tacitus tells us, by the Germans *, who, he says, 
counted by nights, and this ancient custom survives in 
our term of sennight, or seven nights, meaning a week. 
The five-days week is that still used by the Shans of 
Burmah, the men t of the mother country of the Mundas. 
It is also that of Zend chronology, which divides the 
month into two periods, each of fourteen and a half days, 
allotting the fifteenth night to the first half of the month 
and the day to the last, so that the first half contains 
fifteen nights, and the second fifteen days, and the whole 
month twenty-nine nights and days. The divisions of 
the first half of the month, that of the waxing moon, are 
called the Panchak Fartum, the new-moon week, Panchak 
Datigar, the week of the growing moon, and Panchak 
Sitigar, the full-moon week 2 . This month of five-night 
weeks is also that of the Hindu Karanas of twenty-nine 
days divided into two periods of fourteen days each, with a 
fifteenth day and night called the Purnoma Panchayi, the 
completed five (fianch) in the centre apportioned to both 
periods. It is the exact parallel of the Zend month, as 
its light half contains fifteen nights, and its dark half 
fifteen days 3. 

This week gave to the earlier cultivating races of North 
India, called in the Mahabharata and Rigveda the Srin- 
jayas, or men of the sickle (srini), their other name of 
the Panchalas, or men of the five (pancli) claws or fingers 
(alas), and the memory of the sacred five days survives 
in the Panchayats or councils of five elders, who still retain 

1 Tacitus, Germania, ii. 2. 

2 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Mali Yasht, 4 ; S. B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 90, note $< 

3 Sachau, Alberuni's India, chap. Lxxviii. vol. ii. p. 197. 



42 History and Chronotogy 

their primitive function of rulers of the village, its members 
being the village head-man and his four assistants. This 
week is also that of the Scandinavians, called by them 
the Fimt. This five-days week also survives in the five 
Agnis or parent fire-germs, of which the names are recorded 
in the Zendavesta and Atharva-veda. The list of these fires 
as given in the Gathas, with their Sanskrit equivalents, 
is as follows : I. The Berezi Savangha, the eastern (sa- 
vanghd) fire in stones, the Sanskrit Ashmas or Ashman, 
a stone, the meteoric stone used to light the national 
fires of the North. It was believed that this stone brought 
from heaven the spark which in the firmament appeared 
as the lightning in the clouds, causing them to give up 
their rain ; hence the fire is called Berezi, or the fire of 
rain {bares) magically produced by the rain - wand, the 
Baresma. II. The Vohu Fryano, Sanskrit Jathara, the 
womb fire creator of animal life. The Zend Vohu is 
the equivalent of the Sanskrit Vasu, the creator, and Fry- 
ano of Viru-ano, the god of the Viru or generator of animal 
life, the Norse Frio, the seed. III. The Ur-vazista, in 
Sanskrit Aushadha, the fire in medicinal plants, the healing 
and most creating (vasu) fire. IV. The Vazista, the fire 
in the waters of the earth, called both in Zend and Sanskrit, 
Apam Napat, the son of the waters. This is the Sanskrit 
god and Rishi Vashishtha said in the Rigveda to be the son 
of the twin supreme gods Mitra-Varanau " as a drop spilt 
by heavenly favour and received in the folds of a lotus 
blossom" 1 sacred to the water-god. Thus it was the fire 
brought from heaven to earth by Varuna, whom we have 
seen to be the rain-god of the North. He was its joint 
parent with Mitra, the friend, originally the Pole Star 
mother. This was the fire called in Zend Spenishta, the 
most bountiful. V. Naryo Sangha, Sanskrit Naroshamsa, 
praised of men, the Yazad of royal lineage. It was ori- 
nally, according to Rg. x. 61, called Vastospati, the lord 

* Rg. vii. 33, ii. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 43 

(pati)oi the house {vastos), the household fire on the central 
hearth of the house, born from the union of Prajapati (Orion) 
(who, as we shall see, succeeded Canopus as leader of the 
stars) with RohinI, the star Aldebaran, the Queen of the 
Pleiades x . This became the fire called Nabhanedishtha, 
nearest to the navel (nab ha), the central fire on the first earth 
altar, made, as we shall see, in the form of a woman. It 
was in the popular belief born from lightning clouds. 
These fires are in Atharva-veda iii. 21, I, called: I. Those 
of the Earth (IV.) ; II. The Clouds (V.) ; III. The Man 
(II.) ; IV. Stones (I.) ; V. Plants (III.) 2 . 

We find also a survival of the five - days week in the 
five supreme mothers of the Annamese cult of the pri- 
mitive belief represented by the village priestesses called 
Ba-dong, or those inspired by the three mother-goddesses 
Ba-Duc-chua, whose wooden images represent the one 
tree-mother-goddess in the form of the three seasons of 
the year, described in Chapter III. The five goddess 
ministrants are all variant forms of one original Ba-chua, 
and the whole cult is based on the still surviving belief 
in the mother goddess of the ocean abyss Bahu. Their 
names are : — 

1. Thay Tinh Cong Chua, or the star of the waters. 
That of the star mother ship Argo. 

2. Quinh-Hoa Cdng Chua, or the Hortensia flower. 

3. Que Hoa, or the Cinnamon flower. 

4. Bach Hoa, or the White flower. 

5. Hoang Hoa, or the Yellow flower. 

Thus while the first manifestation of the great mother- 
goddess tells of her as the Southern mother-star, the last 
four represent her as the seed-bearing flower of the tree 



Haug, Aitdreya Brahmana, III. 33 ; Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., ii. I, 2, 8, 9 ; 
S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 284, note I. 

2 Mili, Zendavesta, part in. ; Yastra, xvii. ; S.B.E., vol. xxxi. p. 258; Max 
M tiller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. ii. p. 785. 



44 History and Chronology 

of life grown from her ocean abyss r . That this belief in the 
tree-mother goddess of the Pleiades year, and the five "days 
of its week, is a survival of the original theology of the 
Dravidian founders of villages, is rendered still more cer- 
tain by the fact that it is stated in a Siamese manuscript 
giving an account of the astronomy of the country, and 
brought to Europe by M. de la Loubere, the Ambassador to 
Siam from Louis XIV. of France, in 1687^ that the civil 
year of Siam began with the Hindu month Khartik (Octo- 
ber — November), the month of the Pleiades 2 . 

Throughout this account of the two primitive years of two 
seasons each I have spoken of these as being six months in 
duration, but it must be recollected that this was not a de- 
scription intelligible to the primitive man. Their first idea 
of time measurement was to divide the year into two parts, 
the productive and unproductive seasons, and the length 
of these seasons, of which the beginnings were marked by 
the setting of the Pleiades, after or before the sun, and 
by the positions 'of the solstitial sun at mid-winter and mid- 
summer was measured only by the five-day weeks. These 
numbered 72 in the year of 360 and 73 in that of 365 days, 
and the Egyptian year story, which tells how Osiris the 
year god was slain by Set and 72 assistants, seems to show 
that the reckoning of 73 weeks forming a year circle of 365 
days was adopted at a very early period. Set is the god 
ruling the Southern sun 3, that is to say, he is the ruling god 
of a year beginning at the winter solstice. His original 
name was Hapi, the Egyptian form of the Dravidian Kapi, 
and as the ape-god he was the ruler of the Nile. This 
year, beginning at the winter solstice, is the successor of 
another year, when the sun-god of the previous year is 

- M. G. Dumoutier, ( Etudes d'Ethnographie Religeuse Annamite Le Ba 
Dong. Actes du, s Onzieme Congris des Orientalistes Section cPExtrtme Orient, 
pp. 297 ff. 

2 'Notes on Hindu Astronomy,' by J. Burgess, CLE. Journal Royal 
Asiatic Society, 1893, art. xviii. p. 723. 

3 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien ^Egypter, p. 451. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 45 

killed at the time when his successor begins his reign. 
The sun-god thus slain in this story was Osiris, whose year's 
rule ended at the close of his 73 weeks. His body was then 
put into a coffin and thrown into the Nile. Isis set out 
to search for it, and at length she found the coffin enclosed 
in a pillar of the palace of the King of Byblos or Gi-bal, 
the modern Ji-bail, a Phoenician city near Beyrut dedicated 
to the Akkadian fire-god Gi-bil. This pillar was made 
of an erica tree which had grown round the coffin. She 
took the coffin and its contents, the tree-trunk into which 
the dead sun-god had entered as the vital sap whence the 
seed of life was to be born, to Egypt, but left it to seek 
Horus. Then Set and his assistants broke open the coffin 
and cut up the body into 14 pieces, representing the 
measurement of time by lunar phases. On examining 
the facts it is clear that the age indicated in this ancient 
astronomical tale is most remote, and that it represents the 
changes in the year reckoning which took place when the 
old Pleiades and solstitial years of weeks of five days each 
were superseded by one which measured by lunar phases 
the year ruled by Horus the son of the Pole Star goddess ; 
and it probably represented the supersession of the year 
of three seasons described in Chapter III. by that of the 
three years cycle of Chapter V. 

The recollection of the early division of the year into 
72 weeks survived in other ancient theologies besides that 
of Egypt. Thus it is perpetuated in the sacred girdle or 
kusti worn by all Parsi fire worshippers of both sexes. 
This girdle, with which every young man and woman is 
invested when they are fifteen, is made to commemorate 
and impress on the wearer's mind, after the fashion of 
ancient instructors, the calculation of the year and its 
component parts. It is formed of six strands, indicating 
the six seasons of the orthodox Zend year, and each of 
them is made of 12 threads, or 72 in all, the number of five- 
day weeks in the Parsi year of 360 days x . This sacred 

1 For further information on this subject and for the proof that the girdle 



46 History and Chronology 

number 72 survived also in the magic square of 16 squares 
each marked with one of the numbers from 1 to 8 and 
28 to 35. These two series of eight numbers are arranged 
in the square as follows : — 



28 

6 
34 

4 


35 
3 
29 

5 


2 

32 
8 

3° 


7 
31 

1 

33 



and by this arrangement the numbers in every row of four 
squares, either horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, make up, 
when added together, 72. This square has from time imme- 
morial been looked on as most holy by all dealers in witch- 
craft, who believe it to be a protection against the evil eye. 
Other instances of the ancient veneration of this number 72 
are shown in the 72 books into which the Zend Yasna 
is divided, and the remote descent of this number of the 
sacred weeks of the sidereal year appears in the division 
into 72 books of the great astronomical work of the Baby- 
lonian astronomers called the Illuminations of Bel. It 
was written for the library of Sargon of Akkad, who reigned 
3800 B.C. 1 

In this year of 72 weeks each period of six months 
contained 36 weeks, and this became the number most 
frequently occurring in Hindu ritual. These 36 weeks were 
called by the Hindus the 36 steps of Vishnu, the year god 
of the people of the village ( Vish), and these appear in the 
arrangement of the ground consecrated for the Soma sacri- 



both in Hindu and Zend ritual represented the year looked upon as orthodox 
when each girdle pattern was prescribed, see Hewitt, Ruling Races of Pre- 
historic Ti?nes, vol. i., Essay iv. pp. 402 — 410, but it must be remembered 
in reading these remarks that I had not when I wrote the Essay I refer to 
realised the great historical importance of the five-days week. 
1 Sayce, Babylonians and Assyrians, chaps, i. and iii. pp. 5, 60. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 47 

fice which is said to represent the whole earth *. The 
priest in measuring it is directed to make it- 36 steps long 
from West to East 2 , and in this direction we see that these 
36 steps or weeks of the year god mark one half of the 
daily or yearly journey of the sun, who passes from West 
to East and back East to West every day of his yearly course, 
thus completing 72 steps in the day and year. 

D. The diffusion through the world of the five- days week. 

Having now traced the history of the origin of the two 
national years of the sons of the mother-tree whose mother 
stars were the Pleiades, and of the Mundas of the North-east 
who measured their year by the flight of the sun-bird round 
the Pole, and also of the five-days weeks by which they 
reckoned its duration ; and having further shown the wide 
diffusion of this primitive measure of time, I must now 
proceed to show that it is on these two years that all 
national reckonings of annual time in India, South-western 
Asia and Europe are based, and that the conservative Indian 
emigrants who cherished their national customs as their 
most precious possessions took these years with them on 
their change of abode, as well as the distinctive institutions 
of matriarchal village government which I have described 
in Chapter I. These characteristic marks were the central 
village grove, the communal division of land, the seasonal 
dances and common meals, the marriage unions between 
villages instead of between individuals, and the careful 
education of the young, whose oral teaching was in the 
form of tales taught to them by the village elders and 
committed to memory as the most binding links between 
the present and the past. 

The first western land after the valley of the Indus 
reached by the early emigrants from India who were 
seeking new sites for cultivation was the shores of the 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iii. 7, 2, I ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 175. 
- Ibid., iii. 5, 1, 4 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 1.12. 



48 . History and Chronology 

Persian Gulf, and the Delta of the Euphrates and Tigris. 
It was here that they landed from their ships guided by 
Canopus, the Pilot of the mother-ship Argo, as " the black- 
headed sons of la," born of the Southern Ocean mother- 
tree, and founded in this new land-settled government. and 
well-tilled communal villages. They were a people ad- 
dicted to the study of astronomy, who measured their year 
by observing the setting and rising of the stars, and the 
changes in position of the stars and sun. They became the 
Sumerians or dwellers in the low-lying lands of the Euphra- 
tean Delta, the land of Shinar, Genesis x. 10 x . They built 
there the first city of which the foundation is recorded, of the 
city of Erech, called originally Unuk, meaning the " place 
of settlement/' the Enoch of Genesis, iv. 17 2 . Its seaport 
was Eridu or Eriduga, the holy (ditgd) city, and it was 
in its sacred grove that the year-god Dumu-zi was born. 
They became afterwards known as the Kalda or Chaldaeans, 
the dwellers in the marshes of the Euphratean Delta, who, 
according to local tradition, ruled the country from the 
earliest times, and studded it with towns. Berosus, who was 
priest of Bel, and who based his history of Babylon on the 
most ancient cuniform records, states that the first Babylonian 
dynasty after the primaeval deluge, a reminiscence of the 
southern waste of waters, was one of 86 Chaldsean kings 
who reigned 34,080 years 3. The modern representatives 
of these first settlers in the Euphrates valley are the 
Sabaeans, or Mandaites, the sons - of the word of God 
(Manda), the trading population of Babylonia and Mesopo- 
tamia, who begin their lunar zodiac with which they 
measure their months and years with the Parwe, the con- 
ceiving (par) mothers the Pleiades 4. They worship the 
Pole Star as the visible sign of the one father -god, 
and I have given elsewhere a full abstract of the ritual 

1 Lenormant, Chaldcean Magic, Appendix, pp. 393 — 397. 

2 Sayce, Hibbert Lecfotres for 1887, p. 185. 

3 Ibid., ' Babylonia,' Encyc. Brit., vol. iii. p. 184. 

4 Sachau, Alberuni's Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap. xi. p. 227. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 49 

of their celebration of his worship on their New Year's 
Day at the autumnal equinox x . But this was not the date 
of their original New Year's Day, for AlberunI tells us that 
they used to celebrate the Feast of Tents or Booths, with 
which all people in South-western Asia used to begin their 
year, from the 4th to the 18th of Hilal Tishrin II. (October — ■ 
November) 2 . It was then that they worshipped the goddess 
Tarsa, whom AlberunI calls Venus. That is to say, she 
was the Southern mother-tree-god and goddess, the Sanskrit 
Vena invoked with Rama 3, whose name comes from the 
root van, meaning a tree, and who is thus identical with 
Vanaspati, the lord (pati) of the wood (vanas), the central 
tree of the village grove, the god addressed in stanza 10 
of the Apr! hymns addressed to the national gods, as the 
mother of life, the mother-tree crowned with the Pole Star 4. 
It was during this New Year's Feast that they dwelt in 
booths made of tree boughs, to commemorate their ancient 
origin as the forest children of the village grove. Hilal 
Ayyar (April — May), the mid-month of the Pleiades year, 
was also a great festival month among these people. In 
it from the 7th to the 10th they celebrated the festival of 
the blind god Dahdak, the blind gnomon May Pole who 
had once been the Azi Dahaka, or biting snake of the 
Zendavesta, the snake guarding the world's tree in the 
waters of the mother Bahu, who is the unseen and there- 
fore blind Pole Star of the South, the ruler of the southern 
regions, as the Pole Star of the North with the seeing eye 
rules the north. He, as the tree measurer of the year, 
afterwards became the Azi Dahaka slain by Thraetaona, 
the three-headed six-eyed god, of the age of the year of 
three seasons, described in Chapter III. It is in this month 
that Barkhushya, the lightning-god, is worshipped. He, 
the god of the summer lightning, is another form of the 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii. pp. 156 — 165. 

2 Sachau, Alberuni's Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap, xviii. p. 316. 

3 Rg- x. 93, 14. 

4 Rg. iii. 4, 10, v. 5, 10, vii. 2, 10. 

E 



50 History and Chronology 

god Azaf, the son of Barkhya, who was Wazir to Solomon 
the Akkadian Salli-mannu, the fish-sun-god. It was he 
who arrested and confined in chains Sakhr, who had 
stolen the year ring of Salli-mannu, that is to say, 
had made himself the ruler of the first six months of 
the year, from the winter to the summer solstice, when 
the conquering sun - god resumed the throne he had 
abandoned during the winter season I . This Sakhr is 
the Akkadian ram-god Sakh or Sukh, the mother of the 
sun -god called Suk-us 2 , the Akkadian for I star, the 
mother of Dumu-zi, who was born from the mother-tree 
at the winter solstice. The annual victory of the summer 
sun is in the reckoning of the Pleiades year represented 
by the return to the upper world of the May Queen, 
who has been buried in the under-world abyss of the 
Southern sun during the winter months. 

These Sabseans were not in ancient times as they are 
now, merely the artisans and traders of the Euphrates 
valley. They were formerly the rulers of Southern Arabia 
called Seba', and their capital was the great city of Mareb, 
celebrated for its irrigation works and its vast water reservoir. 
Its destruction is spoken of in the Koran as a great national 
calamity 3, They are the people called in Gen. x. 7, Sheba, 
the sons of Raamah or Raghma, the Indian god, father 
of Rama, called in the Mahabharata Raghu, the name 
by which he is still worshipped in Kumaon. He is the 
Northern sun-god of the Pole Star age, when the sun was 
looked on as a day star circling the Pole. These sons of 
Raamah were the leaders of the great national confederacy 
of the sons of Kush, sprung from Rama, whose mother 
in Hindu historical genealogy is called Kush-aloya, the 
house ialoyd) or mother of the Kushites. They are cele- 

1 Burton, Arabian Nights, ' The Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni,' vol. i, 
p. 38, note 6. 

2 Sayce, Assyrian Grammar, Syllabary Signs, ioo, 101. 

s Palmer, Qur'an, The Chapter of Seba, xxxiv. io ; S.B.E. , vol. ix. pp. 



oj the Myth-Making Age. 51 

brated by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekial as the richest 
traders in the East z , and the Assyrian inscriptions speak 
of them as paying tribute in gold, silver, and incense to 
Tiglath Pilesor II. and Sargon, B.C. 733 — 715, after they 
had been conquered by the Assyrians. The ruling tribe 
in the Sabsean confederacy were the Banu Kahtan, the 
Arabic form of the Hebrew Joktan, whose thirteen sons 
named in Gen. x. 26 — 30, are geographical names indicating 
the territories ruled by these early Kushite kings, which 
extended from Arabia to the Mountain of the East. This 
is the parent mountain called by the Akkadians Khar-Sak- 
Kurra, the mountain of the ox (khar), of the rain (sak), 
in the East (kurra) 2 . This was the spur of the Hima^yas, 
whence the Haetumant, the modern Helmund, rose to 
descend to the lake of Kashava or Zarah, where Kavad, 
the first of the Kushika kings, was found as a babe in the 
reeds by the goat-god Uzava3, the Phoenician Uzof, called 
Tumaspa, the horse of darkness. Thus the territory ruled 
by the Sabsean Kushika extended from the home of the 
Kushites on the East to the land of the Arabian Saba or 
Sheba, a son of Joktan. Another son is Dedan, which is 
shown by Gesenius to represent the islands in the Persian 
Gulf, whence, according to Ezekiel xxvii. 20, 15, the Syrian 
merchants imported " precious cloths for riding," that is, 
Persian saddle-bags and carpets, and also "horns of ivory 
and ebony," the tusks of Indian elephants and the wood 
of the Indian Tendoo or Ebony-tree (Diospyros melanoxulon), 
whence the carved black furniture of Bombay and the 
Malabar coast is made. Sheba and Dedan are also in 
another account of their genealogy the sons of Jokshan, 
who was the son of Abram's wife Keturah, who, as we 

1 Is. lx. 6 ; Jer. vi. 20 ; Ezekiel xxvii. 22. 

2 Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, pp. 308, 169 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races oj 
Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii. pp. 142 — 145. This was the Zend parent 
ox Sar-saok ; West, Bunda/iis/i,-xv. 27, xvii. 4; S.B.E., vol. v. pp. 58, 62. 

3 West, Bundahish, xxxi. 23 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta FarvardTn Vas/it, 
131 ; S.B.E. , vol. v. p. 136, xxiii. p. 221. 

E 2 



52 History mid Chronology 

are told, lived in the East x . The name Keturah is derived, 
according to Gesenius, from the root katar, to enclose, 
hence it is an exact translation of the Indian Vritra, the 
enclosing snake; and the name also means incense, which 
was originally an Indian product yielded, as it still is, by 
the Indian incense-tree, the Salai {Boswellia thurif era), which 
grows on every rocky hill in Central India, where nothing 
else will flourish. Therefore the children of Abram, the 
father Ram and the enclosing snake are clearly an Indian- 
born race, a conclusion further confirmed by the inclusion 
of Havilah and Ophir among the sons of Joktan. The 
land of Havilah is said in Gen. ii. II, to be that watered 
by the Pishon or river of irrigating channels, the river Indus, 
and Ophir is the land whence Solomon brought apes, ivory, 
peacocks, and almug or sandal wood 2 , all called in the 
Hebrew narrative by names shown by Gesenius to be of 
Indian - Dravidian origin. It was these people who took 
with them from India to the Persian Gulf their god Rama, 
who became the Babylonian storm-god Ram-anu, the Rama 
Hvashtra of the Zendavesta, to whom the Ram Yasht is 
dedicated, and the god worshipped at Damascus as Hadad 
Rimmon, called by Hesychios Papa? 6 vyjnaTos 0e6s; the 
supreme god Ram. 

These Indian Sabsean sons of Rama were the great 
traders of the Indian Ocean, who took with them for ex- 
portation to foreign lands Indian gold and silver, as well 
as spices and incense. It is from this last industry that 
they acquired the name of Atjub, or men of incense (tib), 
and this was the name which, according to Dr. Glaser, 
became the Greek ^Ethiops or the Ethiopian 3. This trade 
in incense, which was originally exclusively Indian, 
was transferred by these Turano-Dravidian Kushite mer- 
chants to Arabia, when they finally settled there and 
extracted incense from the Boswellia Carteria, an indigenous 



Gen. xxv. I. - i Kings x. n, 22, 23 ; 2 Chron. ix. 21. 

3 Glaser, Die Abyssinier in Arabien inid Africa, p. 27. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 53 

Arabian tree allied to the Indian Salai, the Boswellia 
thurifera. 

From Arabia they passed to Abyssinia, whose kings of 
Kushite descent called themselves the kings of El-Habasat, 
that is of the country of the Hbsti, the collectors of incense 
and aromatic spices r . It was by way of Abyssinia that 
they passed into Egypt when they established the rule of 
the Egyptian Kushite kings, whose kingly dignity was 
marked by the sign of the Urceus snake depicted on their 
foreheads ; and this was the signal also painted on the fore- 
heads of their parents in India, the Naga or Kushika kings, 
known as the Nagbunsi or sons (bunsi) of the Naga snake. 

The ruling tribe among the Banu Kahtan, or sons of 
Joktan, were the Ya-arubah 2 , who traced their descent to 
a female demon 3, that is to say to the goddess of the 
Southern abyss of water Ba-hu, the mother of all living 
things, called also by the Akkadians Nin-lil, the lady (nin) 
of the South-west world of ghosts or dust (lil), the ocean 
abyss where the South-west monsoon comes. She was the 
Assyrian goddess Allat, the unwearied one who rules over 
the subterranean world of the dead, the goddess called by 
Herodotus III. 8, Alilat, the chief goddess of the Arabians, 
the goddess called Tursa in Alberuni's account of the 
Sabaean year, the goddess of the Pleiades, called by the 
Arabians Tur-ayya4. 

This mother -goddess of the Pleiades year ruled that 
of the primitive Arabians as well as that of the later 
Sabsean merchant princes. The celebration of the com- 
mencement of this early year is recorded by AlberunI in 
his account of the great annual fairs held in Hadhramaut 
and El Nejd, the Southern and Northern provinces of 

1 Glaser, Die Abyssinier in Arabien nnd Africa, p. 27. 

2 Burton, Arabian Nights, 'The Story of Gharib and his brother Ajib,' 
vol. v. p. 166. 

3 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. ii. p. 50. 

* Tiele, Outlines of the History of the Ancient Religions: Primitive Arabian 
Religion, p. 63. 



54 History and Chronology 

the ancient Sabaean kingdom, divided from each other 
by the Arabian desert. The New Year's Fair of the year 
of the Turayya or Pleiades began on the 14th of Dhu- 
alka'da (October— November), that is on the 1st of 
November, and lasted for the rest of the month, during 
which time universal peace was observed 1 . It was the 
annual New Year's gathering of all the principal Arabian 
tribes. This fair festival is still kept by the Bedouin 
descendants of the ancient Himyarites, who resort yearly 
in November to the fair held at the tomb of their ancestral 
parent Salah, the Shelah of Gen. x. 24, and the giant father 
of Eber. It was their children who peopled the Hadhra- 
maut, the Himyarite land of Southern Arabia, the name 
Hadhramaut being a form of the Hebrew Hazarmaveth, 
which is named as a province of the Sabaean kingdom 
in the Genesis list of the thirteen sons of Joktan 2 . The 
month Dhu-alka'da is called Zu-1-ka'da in the Arabian 
Nights historical tale of Kamar-al-Zaman, the moon of 
the age, and Badur the full moon. It was on Friday, 
the fifth of this month, that is at the end of the first 
five-days week of the year, that the crescent and full moon 
were united 3, and this shows that the original year of the 
Arabian Sabaeans coincided with that of the same peopie 
on the Euphrates, for each of these months begins with the 
new moon Hi-lal. 

Hence it is completely proved by the Sabaean and 
Arabian measurements of time that the first month of the 
year throughout South-western Asia was the Pleiades 
month of October — November, and that it began with a great 
annual fair gathering of the people of each township or 
province in booths made of tree branches to commemorate 
their original descent from the central village grove. It 
must also be remembered that this original year festival 

1 Sachau, Alberuni's Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap. xx. p. 332. 

2 Bent, Southern Arabia, chap. xi. pp. 130 — 134. 

3 Burton, Arabian Nights, ' Tale of Kumar-al-Zaman and Badur,' vol. iii. 
p, 36. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 55 

was instituted when time was measured not by months but 
by five-day weeks, as in the story of the Kamar-al-Zaman 
and Badur. This was before the age of the Arab and 
Indian measurements of time by the lunar zodiac of twenty- 
seven stars, which will form the subject of Chapter V. The 
Arabic name of this month beginning with Dhu or Zu 
shows it to be derived from the Akkadian Zu bird, the bird 
of wisdom who " stole the tablets of Mul-lil," the lord of the 
dust (HI), the wind god T , and became the ruler of the year, 
who developed in Egyptian mythology into the Egypt god 
Dhu-ti, the bird of life (//), whom we call Thoth, and who 
carried the recording feather in her hand. The name Dhu 
or Zu is a form of Khu, which is also the name of the 
Akkadian and Egyptian. water-cloud bird which brings up 
the south-west monsoon. This name Khu became in 
Southern India "shu," as the Greek Serca, ten, became the 
Sanskrit dashan. It was the sons of this bird called Shu, 
Su, or Sau, who were the western trading race of India, 
who measure time by the Pleiades year, and are still called 
Sau-kars, or men who do the business (/ear) of the Sao. 
They became the rulers of the coastland of Guzerat, called 
in Sanskrit Sau-rashtra, or the kingdom (rds/itra) of the 
Saus, and of the delta of the Indus, where they were called 
the Su-varna, or men of the tribe (varna) of the Su race, 
who founded the Greek port of Patala on the site of what 
is now the Sind city of Hyderabad. It is about 115 miles 
from the sea, and the time when it was the exporting 
seaport of the Indus valley, as measured by the present 
rate of river deposits, may be placed about 9000 years ago, 
or about 7000 B.C. 2 Thus in the years before that date 
it was the rival of Eridu, the port on the Euphrates, which 
is now, like Patala, far from the sea, but it was formerly 
the port of the Sumerian emigrants and traders from India 
to the Euphratean Delta. It was they who named their 



1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 297. 
- Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. ; Essay iii. pp. 140, I4'- 



56 History and Chronology 

inland capital, now called Telloh Gir su, or the lightning 
{gir) bird, and Gir is apparently the root of the Hindu Giri, 
a hill. It was they who gave its name of Shushan, or the 
land of the Shus, to the province to the east of the Persian 
Gulf, the home of the worshippers of the great god Susi-nag, 
the snake-parent of the Shus who dwells in the sacred wood, 
the village grove 1 , and whose image was depicted on the 
Parthian banners. 

The Indian emigrants who took with them to the Persian 
Gulf, Mesopotomia, and Arabia, their year measured by the 
Pleiades and their communal villages with their groves, also 
took with them their seasonal dances, their matriarchal 
customs regulating the intercourse between the sexes and 
the birth of the village children. These customs survived 
in the dances to Istar and her successor, the Babylonian 
goddess Mylitta. For the village mothers who took part 
in these dances in the matriarchal age became in later 
times " the consecrated maidens of Istar," and the Kedesha 
or temple women of the Jews and Egyptians 2 . Also all 
Babylonian wives were obliged to begin their marriage by 
submitting to union with a stranger in the temple of 
Mylitta. 

When in their progress up the Euphrates they reached 
Asia Minor the dances were consecrated to the worship 
of Cybele, meaning the cave. She was the Phrygian moun- 
tain goddess, whose grove was that of the village placed 
at the foot of the hill. These dances became in course 
of time those of the worship of Aphrodite, Dionysus and 
Venus. The village grove attached to every village in 
Syria and Asia Minor became in Greece the Temenos, 
the Latin Templum, the sacred land set apart for the 
parent-god of the village. This was placed on the Akro- 

1 Maspero, Ancient Egypt and Assyria, chap. xvii. p. 316. 

2 Strabo, xviii. 1, p. 463, says that the Theban priestesses were obliged 
to be Kedesha till they married ; also Herod., ii. 46, tells us how the women 
who served in the temple of the Mendesian goat used to prostitute themselves. 
Movers, Die Phonizier, i. p. 42. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 57 

polis or Capitol, the mother hill in the centre of the village 
or township area. This was consecrated to the Echis, 
snake-parent of the Achaeans, its sons. This snake was 
worshipped in Athens as the snake Erectheus or Ericthonius, 
which lived in the Erectheum, and on whose altar no living 
victim was allowed to be offered, only cakes, as in the sacrifices 
of the southern founders of villages J . The original three days 
feast of firstfruits inaugurating the November year survived 
in Asia Minor and Greece in the festival of the Thesmophoria. 
This, according to Herodotus ii. 171, was originally a Pelas- 
gian festival introduced by the sons of Danaus, the Indian 
Danava, and he says, vi. 16, that it was held in a cavern 
at night at Ephesus, one of the cities founded by the 
matriarchal Amazons. This shows that it was a festival 
of the southern races who, as the Jews still do, began their 
day at six o'clock in the evening, when the equinoctial sun 
and the Pleiades set together, at the beginning of the 
Pleiades year. It was a festival in which only the women 
of each demos or village took part, and was held on the 
nth, 12th and 13th of Puanepsion (October — November), 
answering to the 24th, 25th and 26th of October, and was 
accompanied by dances. Also during its continuance the 
women lodged by twos in tents or huts made of branches 
within the precincts of the Thesmophorium, as in the Feast 
of Booths in South-western Asia. During the festival pigs 
were thrown down the vaults consecrated to the serpents, 
and this sacrifice was apparently a duplicate of that of the 
pigs offered by the Dosadhs of Maghada to the northern 
sun-god Ra-hu. It was a northern addition to the southern 
ritual, which forbade the offering of any living victims, and 
allowed only the offering of the firstfruits of the earth. 
The festival, as far as the women were concerned, was care- 
fully divested of any traces of solar worship, for they were 
forbidden while it lasted to eat pomegranates, the fruit 
especially consecrated to the sun-god, and from which the 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, i. 26, 5 ; vol. i. p. 38 ; ii. pp. 16S, 169. 



5 8 History and Chronology 

god Ram of Damascus got the name of Hadad Rimmon, 
the hastening pomegranate I . 

This feast was followed by the Chalkeia held on the 
19th Puanepsion, the 1st of November. This was dedicated 
to Athene, the tree-mother, and to Hephaistos, the Sanskrit 
Yavishtha 2 , the most binding (yd) god, the god of the bar- 
ley iyavd) bound in sheaves, who united heaven and earth 
as the male form of generation which kindles the fire in 
the southern female fire-block, the source whence life is 
born. He was the god lame in both legs (afi<f>Lyvr]6is), that 
is to say, he was the one-legged fire-drill of heaven, the 
kindler of the year fires of the earth-mother-goddess, from 
whence the household fires of the fire-worshippers who suc- 
ceeded the matriarchal communities were lighted. His 
mythological history shows that the conception of his divi- 
nity was a blending of the northern smith-god bearing the fire- 
cooking hammer, and the father-god of the fire-worshippers 
who bore the staff of authority, the rain-wand, which was 
believed to be shrouded in heaven in the mists of the upper 
air, and to revolve at the impulse of the Pole Star god in 
the fire-block of the southern mother-tree. 

Between these two festivals the village feast of the Apa- 
turia was held, and at it the Phratria or brotherhood of each 
village met and revised the annual lists of the members of 
the village community, elected village officers for the next 
year, and received new members entering the community. 
At this feast the year's fires in each household were lighted 
from the central fire of the village, kindled on the hearth 
dedicated to the Greek goddess Hestia, the Roman Vesta 3. 

Thus we see that the ritual of these Greek festivals of 
October — November proves clearly that they are survivals 
of the New Year's festival of the Southern Pleiades year, 
beginning on the 1st of November with a three days' feast to 

1 Frazer, ' Thesmophoria,' Encyc. Brit., vol. xxiii. pp. 296 — 298. 
- Max Muller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology^ vol. ii. pp. Soi— 
803. 

3 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, pp. 517, 518. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 59 

the dead, and also with a feast of firstfruits I which is exactly 
reproduced in the Thesmophoria, in which one of the three 
days of the feast was a day of mourning. This mourning 
of the women was made part of the ritual of the feast to 
commemorate the mourning of Demeter for the loss of her 
daughter Persephone, who was carried away at its com- 
mencement by the god of the realms below the earth, that 
is, the king of the Southern abyss of waters on which the 
earth floated. This is exactly parallel with the mourning 
of the women for Tammuz or Dumu-zi, who in his year's 
festival in Syria at the autumnal equinox, died before it 
began and returned to life on the eighth day of the feast 
in the barley, wheat and fennel, sown beforehand by the 
mourning women in the earthenware pots called the gar- 
dens of Adonis, which were found on that day with the 
buried seeds springing to fresh life from the earth. This 
parallel proves that the mourning for Persephone is the 
original form of that in Syria, lamenting the close of the 
dying year of the later phase of year-reckoning described in 
Chapter V., which is to revive in its reanimated successor. 

It will be made clear by an examination of some of the 
popular folk - tales of the Cinderella series, that this is a 
true interpretation of the story of the Thesmophoria, and 
that it is like that of the plants in the gardens of Adonis, 
a northern importation of the festival marking the close 
of the year in the south, and its revival in the first-fruits 
then consumed. The oldest of these tell the story of the 
year of two seasons in that of two sisters, who were origi- 
nally the goddesses ruling the two divisions of the year. 
In these the youngest despised sister who was made 
the kitchen wench, and located in the realms of the dead, 

1 The combined feast of firstfruits and the festival to the Dead are held 
in the beginning of November in the Tonga Islands, Ceylon, and by the 
Dyaks of Borneo. It is called Inachi in Fiji, and Nicapian in Borneo. A 
similar festival called the Janthur Puja is observed by the Sautals of Bengal 
in the beginning of November. Blake, Astronomical Mytho., pp. 115 — 119, 
121, 126 ; Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii., Sautals, p. 233. 



do History and Chronology 

is transformed by her guardian fairy into the beautiful 
maiden clothed in gorgeous apparel, who drops her glass 
or ice shoe by which the sun-prince tracks her, and is wedded 
to him after he has vowed that he will only marry the 
maiden whom the shoe will fit. In one of the simplest of 
these stories, No. 10 in Miss Roalfe Cox's collection of 
Cinderella variants r , the guardian and aider of the future 
mother of the sun-god is her dead mother, the dead year, 
who gave her a cloth with food in it, which would never be 
empty, and would enable her to feed herself in the hut to 
which she escaped from the cruelty of her stepmother and 
her daughter. This food store-chest becomes in another 
story, 59, p. 282, a red bull, which is placed under her charge, 
and who supplies her with food from his right ear, an in- 
cident which is repeated in the Georgian Cinderella story 
of Conkiajgharuna, which does not appear in Miss Cox's 
volume, and in which the heroine is fed by a cow 2 , a sur- 
vival of the Hindoo red - cow - star RohinI or Aldebaran. 
It is in the Annamite story of Cinderella that we find what is 
clearly the original form of the incident of the food stored 
for the buried mother of the sun-god. In this story the 
two rival seasons of the year are the despised kitchen wench 
called Ka'i Ta'm, Rice-husk, and her step-sister Ka'i Ka'm, 
or Rice-grain. The helper of the persecuted maiden is the 
little fish Bo'ng, who was at first thrown aside as worthless by 
the step-mother of Ka'i Ta'm and her daughter, but who was 
eaten by them when they saw that Rice-husk had made 
it fat and large by feeding it. His spirit appeared after 
his death, and told Rice-husk to bury his bones in four 
jars to be placed under her bed, the seed sown in the jars 
called the Gardens of Adonis. When the day came when 
she wished to go to the national festival of the opening 
year, to which her step-mother and sister were going, it 
was the spirit of the fish, embodying the soul of life dwelling 



1 Cox, Cinderella Variants, No. 10, p. 144, published by the Folklore Society* 
3 Wardrop, Georgian Folk Tales, xi. p. 63 ff. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 61 

in the Southern Ocean, which enabled her to perform the 
task set her by her step-mother, and it was from the jars 
containing his bones that she took out the horse that was to 
carry her to the festival and the dress in which she was to 
captivate the prince. She dropped her shoe as she was 
mounting the horse when she was leaving the feast, and 
when her lover came to search for the owner of the shoe 
and found her, she promised to be his bride. But her step- 
mother substituted her daughter Rice-grain at the wedding, 
and the prince did not find out the deception till after 
the marriage, when Rice-husk, who had drowned herself 
in a well, returned to life as an oriole and revealed herself 
to her lover, first in this form and afterwards in her true 
shape l . 

The truths herein hidden, when translated from metaphor 
into the actual facts, which the village elder who framed 
the story tried to impress upon the memory of the 
children he taught, told them that the true mother of life 
was the plant, and that the germ of future life which the plant 
concealed within itself could only be transmitted to those 
whom its products nourish in the seed when protected by its 
capsule or husk. Without this protection it would decay 
uselessly, and therefore the true mother of life is this pro- 
tecting covering and not the seed which it protects. When 
the seed and its protecting mother are buried in the earth, 
and thus sent for a season into the land ruled by the under- 
ground mother-ocean, the home of the fish, the soul of life, it 
is nourished by the store of food it takes with it and emerges, 
through the strength imbibed from this meat, into the upper 
air. There it becomes the growing plant, clothed in the 
summer array provided from its secret store. It is in this 
guise embraced by the sun-god, who follows the traces of its 
flying footsteps in the opening foliage, and who is deceived 
in his search by the false spring maiden, who pretends to be 

1 M. G. Dumoutier, Etudes d 'Ethnographic Religieuse Annamite, Actes 
clu Onzieme Congres des Orientalistes, sect, ii., D'extreme Orient, pp. 374 — 
376. 



62 History and Chronology 

the fruitful bride of summer. The true summer goddess, 
when found and caressed by the sun, covers herself with 
flowers, which again reproduce their mother in the seed 
they bring forth. 

We can see in this story how the folk-tale grew up from the 
poetical statements of natural facts, and can understand the 
method of its production, and see how it was very frequently 
the expansion of the pithy proverbs which abound in the 
speech of all Dravidian people, and of those whose culture 
has been derived from Dravidian sources. It was these 
proverbs which preserved the memory of the story in the 
minds of those who had learnt both together, and to whom 
the recollection of the proverbs recalled the story. 

Thus the story of Demeter and Persephone, embodied in 
the ritual of the Thesmophoria of October — November, is 
one which was originally told in the Southern Hemisphere 
of the rice seed, which was to become the mother of life 
to the people born of the village grove who began their 
year in November. It is the seed-husk buried with its 
enclosed seed in November which becomes the May Queen 
of the next year, the maiden 'mother adored throughout 
Europe in the dances round the May Pole, which reproduce 
those of the stars round the Pole Star. Thus the May- 
pole is a survival of the mother -tree, and of Southern 
Pleiades year of two seasons. 

This year was that observed by the Druids throughout 
Western Europe. They lighted their year's fires on the 
ist of November, and the New Year's festival lasted for 
three days before and three days after that date ; this week 
was called the Samhain I . This festival still survives every- 
where throughout Europe in the feasts of All Hallows 
Eve, All Saints, and All Souls Day, and the annual 
meeting of the village assembly on the ist of November 
is reproduced in every municipality in England, for it is on 
this day that the mayor and municipal officers for the 
year are elected. 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, p. 518. 



' St 
of the Myth-Making Age. 63 

A further examination of Celtic Mythology gives still 
more striking evidence of the close connection between it 
and Indian historical astronomy. In the Indian and 
Australian history of the Pleiades year, the bird that 
drags the Pleiades round the pole is the crow or raven-star 
Canopus, who appears in the mythology of the Cymri as 
Bran the raven. He is the god who voyaged in his star-ship 
to the " IsJaniLof the Blest," in Southern Mag-Findargat, 
the White Silver Plain. This was the island in which 

grows 0tCcl 

11 An ancient tree with blossoms, 
On which birds call to the hours 
In harmony. It is their wont 
To call together every hour 1 .'' 

This is the world's tree of Rg. I. 164, 20 — 22, on which the 
two ravens sit as guardians of this time record. And the 
story told in the Welsh Triads, III. 4, of the origin of the 
Cymri, proves that the raven-star-god and his followers 
were emigrants from the islands in the Southern Ocean, 
where the world's tree of the mud-goddess Tan grew. 
It is there said that they were led by Hu the mighty, 
that is by the cloud-bird Khu, to Wales from Diffrobani. 
This is explained in the text as Constantinople, but Professor 
Rhys has shown that Diffrobani is the Welsh form of 
Taprobane, the Latin name of Ceylon 2 . This was the 
island of Agastya, the star-god Canopus, who was the 
son of the tree grown from the mud of Bahu, the ocean 
bird of the Southern Hemisphere. Bran's father was Llyr, 
the god of the sea, and hence the Eastern and Western 
raven-star were both children of the parent ocean. 

Llyr's chief temple in England was at Caer Llyn, 
the city Leir-cestre or Leicester. This temple, accord- 
ing to Geoffrey of Monmouth, was a cavern hollowed 
in the earth beneath the river Soar. He was there 
worshipped as the year-god of the Cymri, who began 
their year on the 1st of November. This New Year's 

1 Meyer and Nutt, The Voyage of Bran, Stanza 7, vol. i. p. 6. 
2 Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, pp. 334, 345. 



64 History and Chronology 

festival was attended by all the artisans who worked 
before the god for a short time at their respective trades *. 
This was a custom observed at Rome and also in India, 
where at the Gond festival of the Akkadi held at the 
beginning of their year, on the 18th of Baisakh (Vz sakhd) 
or the 3rd of May, the Indian May Day, every cultivator 
drives his plough over the land in observance of this ancient 
custom, though the earth is baked as hard as a brick, 
and quite unfit for ploughing. 

Again the raven-star Canopus, son of the tree of Bahu, 
was a god of the astronomical theology of Tan or Danu, 
the Akkadian and Indian parent Pole Star god. His 
Celtic equivalent Bran was the chief god of the Tuatha 
De Danann, the tribes born of the goddess Danu 2 , that 
is of the world's tree grown from the mud {tin or tan) of the 
Southern Ocean. He was also the god who guarded the 
"Cauldron of Life" in Caer-Sidi, meaning "The Turning 
Castle " of the Pole Star god. This was in India the Castle 
of Agastya, called in the Ramayana the Labyrinthine 
Castle of Ravana, the ten-headed god, the ten lunar months 
of gestation of the mother-ship or tower of Life described 
in Chapter V. 

This Cauldron of Life in the Head of Hades was in 
another form the vessel of the Holy Grail guarded by 
Bran, and this, like the seed in the rice-husk in the 
Annamite story of Cinderella, had an unlimited capacity 
for supplying nourishment, for it multiplied like the growing 
corn a hundred fold or more every food placed in it 3. 

Bran, the god who guarded this mother-tree and her seed, 
was the god with the Wonderful Head {Uther-Ben), the year 
gnomon-stone 4, and his year's voyage to the southern land 
of the mother-tree is a variant form of that of Orwandil, the 
star giant of the north, whose toe was the star Rigel in 

1 Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap. vi. p. 131. 

2 Ibid., Hilbert Lectures for 1886, p. 89. 

1 Ibid., The Arthurian Legend, pp. 305 — 315. 
4 Ibid., Hibbert Lectures for 1886, p. 97. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 65 

Orion I . He went in 72 ships, the 72 weeks of Bran's 
year, to seek his bride, Bridget, the daughter of the god 
Dagda, and he was in short the year-prince of the story 
of the year of two seasons. The year-maiden he sought, 
St. Bride or St. Bridget, was, as her name, derived from Brig, 
pre-eminent power, tells us, the renowned goddess of know- 
ledge, skilled in smith work 2 , and hence the maker of the 
year and its products. Her father, Dagda or Dago-devos, 
is the ruler of heaven, deposed, like the Greek turannos, by his 
son Mac Oc, the god of a new year 3, and as the first god 
of the Tuatha De Danann he is clearly an equivalent of the 
year-god of the Indian Danava. 

This is the Indian god Daksha, whose name is like that 
of the Irish Dago, formed from the root Dag or Dak, meaning 
to show; hence he is the pointing god who marks by the 
Pole Star the point round which the heavens revolve. He 
is the god who has the showing hand, the hand of power 
with its five fingers which takes the stars round the Pole and 
marks the course of the year's circuit. He is named in 
Rg. ii. 27, 1, as the fifth of the six Adityas or beginning 
gods, that is to say, he was the god completing the five-days 
week before the introduction of the later six-days week. 

In the historical genealogies of the Mahabharata his wife 
is said to have been born from the left toe of Brahma, 
the primal creator, the ape-god of the early speculators, and 
his fifty daughters all represent sections of time in different 
measures of year-time. Among these are the twenty-seven 
wives of Chandra the moon-god, the twenty-seven stars 
marking the monthly course of the moon through the 
heavens in the three years cycle year described in Chapter V. 
In the words of the poet "they are all employed in 
indicating time and assisting the courses of the worlds" 

1 Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale, ii. 13; Ker, Notes on 
Orendel and other Stories, Folklore for 1897, pp. 290 ff. 

2 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. i. pp. 75, 76. 

3 Ibid., Lect. ii. p. 154, vi. p. 644. 

4 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxv., Ixvi. pp. 185, 186, 189. 

F 



66 History and Chronology 

One of these daughters is Danu, the third month in the 
year of thirteen months, the subject of Chapter VIII. ; and 
she, the mother of the Irish Tuatha De Danann, is also the 
mother of the Indian Danava, and also of forty sons, the 
forty months of the three years cycle year. 

Bridget or Brigit, the daughter of the Irish Daksha called 
Dago, was one of three sisters all of the same name, the 
three seasons of the year, which were originally, as we have 
seen, only two ; and it was these two who were distinguished 
among the Brigits, one being a physician, a wise medicine- 
woman, and the other a smith, and there are no special 
characteristics assigned to the third T . But in seeking for 
the original source of the name and the mythology of these 
goddesses we must turn to the Vedic prototype of Brigit, 
the goddess Brihati with the same name, in which the h has 
taken the place of the guttural g. She is called in Rg. i. 
52, 13, the goddess of the highest heaven and of the Brihati 
metre of thirty-six syllables. 

This and the other Vedic metres, the Gayatrl with lines 
of eight syllables, the Tristubh of eleven, and the Jagatl 
of twelve, were invented by the Vedic poets as methods 
of perpetuating the remembrance of various systems of 
measuring time by weeks of eight days and by years of 
eleven and twelve months, which I shall describe in their 
chronological order. And we shall see, when I describe 
in Chapter VII. the fifteen-months year with its weeks 
of eight and its months of twenty-four days, that the 
authors of the Satapatha BraJnnana distinctly state that 
the kindling hymn of this year with its fifteen Gayatrl 
stanzas of three lines of eight syllables each is meant to 
describe this year of fifteen months, each of twenty-four 
days and three eight-day weeks. The fundamental rule laid 
down in the Brahmanas to govern the ritualistic arrange- 
ments of each year is that " the year is the sacrifice 2 ," that 
is to say, that in the course of each year there is a stated 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, p. 75. 
2 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 2, 5, 7 — 13; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 60—62. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 67 

order of sacrificial observances beginning, continuing and 
ending the year. This rule is further interpreted by the 
statement made in connection with the erection and conse- 
cration of the first official altar, that of earth in the form 
of a woman, that Vishnu the year-god and his altar are 
enclosed by the metres, that is by the poetical record in the 
ritualistic metres of the successive historical changes in time 
measurement which they indicate. 

This BrihatJ metre or stanza of two lines of eight syllables 
each, one of twelve and one of eight, making thirty-six in 
all, is therefore a historical summary of an ancient time 
measurement. The Brahmanas tell us that the measurement 
indicated by the Brihati metre is that of the easterly line 
of the thirty-six steps of Vishnu passing from West to East 
over the length of the Soma sacrificial ground symbolising 
the earth l . In other words, the Brihati metre is an algebraic 
form of the statement that the sun-year-god who begins his 
journey from the West at sunset, according to the rule of 
time measurement adopted in the first sidereal year, makes 
the half of his annual year's journey round the Pole in 
thirty-six steps or weeks. This journey, owing to the 
obliquity of the ecliptic, is never like the altar-line of thirty- 
six steps, exactly from West to East, except at the equi- 
noxes ; and therefore this line only measures the sun's 
course in a year reckoned by the equinoxes, a measurement 
used, as we shall see, in the age of the three years cycle 
year, when the orthodox Soma sacrificial ground was con- 



1 Eggeling, Sat. Brdk., iii. 5, 1, 9 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 112, 113. This 
rule, requiring the length of the consecrated Soma ground to measure 36 feet 
from West to East, which was first promulgated by the authors of the pre- 
Sanskrit Ikshvahu ritual, was continued when the latest brick altar of the 
year of seven-days weeks, the Agnichayana, was made the orthodox altar 
of the Vedic ritual ; for in laying out the ground for the building of that altar 
it is ordered, ' ! the builder should measure a plot thirty-six steps long from 
West to East, thirty steps broad at the West, and twenty-four at the East 
end, so that its whole circumference should measure ninety steps, the fourth 
part of the 360, making the year." — Eggeling, Sat. Brah., x. 2, 3, 4 ; S.B. E., 
vol. xliii. p. 308. 

E 2 



68 History and Chronology 

secrated. The original solar year was one measured by the 
solstices, and in this year the path of the solstitial setting 
sun is from South-west to North-east at the winter, and 
North-west to South-east at the summer solstice. This was 
the original path indicated by the Brihati metre, and the 
memory of this is preserved in Hindu ritual in the sign 
of the eight-rayed star, marked by the sacred plough under 
the foundations of the East and most orthodox year-altar, 
that of the brick Agnichayana altar of the sun-bird rising 
in the East at the Vernal equinox. On this historical 
tablet the year-path of the sun-bird of the two series of 
thirty-six weeks, making a year of seventy-two weeks, 

is marked by the St. Andrew's Cross of the Flying Bird 

rw ne 

yC for it is from the South-west corner that the plough 

SW SE 

begins its course in tracing the sacred sign. Therefore the 
original Brihati measurement of thirty-six weeks or steps for 
the half-year represented a year beginning at the winter 
solstice with the setting in the South-west of the Brihati 
sun, which was thought to go round the Pole as a star 
in an annual course of seventy-two and a half-yearly course 
of thirty-six weeks. 

This metre is, as we are told, consecrated to Brihaspati, 
called in the Brahmanas the High Priest of the gods, 
the god of the upper region, round which lies the path 
of Aryaman, the Star Arcturus in Bootes J . It is to him 
that the central place is given in the Panchabila, or five-fold 
sacrifice offered at the end of the Dashapeya on a square 
altar with its sides facing the points of the compass. The 
offering to Brihaspati is placed in the centre, those to 
the other four gods ruling the year being placed at the 

it 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 3, 1, 2 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 59; Aryaman is, 
according to Sachau, Alberunl's India, vol. i., chap, xxii., p. 242, one of the 
fourteen stars in the constellation Shimshumara, which drives the other stars 
round the Pole, and represents the West foot of the constellation. See Hewitt, 
Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. Essay v. pp. 416 — 421, for the 
functions of Arcturus as a star leader. 



f 



of the Myth- Making Age. 69 

side dedicated to each god I . Thus the BrihatI metre 
is that dedicated to the Pole Star god Brihaspati, and it 
is also said in Rg. x. 181, 2, to have been brought from 
Vishnu, the year-god, whose steps measure the year by 
Bharadvaja the lark, that is to say, it represents the circuit 
of the year-sun-bird round the pole. This interpretation 
is confirmed by the rules for the recitation of the Brihat 
Saman. This is a recitation of the two first stanzas of 
Rg. vi. 46, a hymn attributed to Bharadvaja embodying 
a prayer to Indra, the rain-god for rain. In stanza 7 of 
this hymn this god, who as the god Suk-ra, the Vedic form 
of the original Akkadian rain-mother Suk-us, a name of 
Istar 2 , is implored to protect especially the five nations 
of the sons of the Nahusha, the great snake, that is to 
the original dwellers in India who adored the snake as 
guardian of the village. It is directed in the rules for 
the consecration of the brick altar of the sun-bird rising 
in the East that these verses in the BrihatI metre are 
to be recited at the left or North wing of the sun-bird 3. 
This altar was built, as we shall see, at a much later period 
than the original earth altar in the form of a woman, and 
its successor the square altar, and they all represent in a 
symbolical form the course of the year. 

In this year's history the representation of the sun and 
stars as flying year-birds is older than all sacrificial altars, 
and it is to this primaeval epoch, when the year's course 
of the sun-bird and of the raven-star Canopus was measured 
by two periods of thirty-six weeks each, that the historical 
legend of the two Bridgets, daughters of Dagda or Daksha the 
Pole Star god, belongs. The first Bridget represented the sun 
starting from South to North at the winter solstice, and the 
second the Northern sun of the summer solstice returning 
to its winter home in the South. 

This latter episode of the Brihati Saman legend was 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 5, 1, I ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 120. 

2 Sayce, Assyrian Grammar : Syllabary Sign 101. 

3 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ix. I, 2, 37 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. p. 179. 



70 History and Chronology 

called in Vedic ritual that indicated by the Rathamtara or 
Ratha-tur (Grassmann) Saman x , that celebrating the re- 
volution or returning [titr) of the sun chariot iyatlia) from 
North to South, a metaphor reproduced in the Irish Caer 
Sidi or Turning tower. These are two verses in the Brihati 
metre, Rg. vii. 22 and 23. They embody another prayer 
to Indra for rain, and this Rathamtara Saman is said in 
Rg. x. 181, 1, to have been brought from Vishnu by 
Vashishtha, the reputed author of this hymn, who is, as 
I have shown on p. 42, the perpetual fire burning on the altar 
of the god of the summer solstice in the North and of the 
winter solstice in the South, when her fire is the subterranean 
home of fire whence the sun gets its light and heat. It 
is these second Brihati stanzas which are recited at the 
brick-altar consecration at the right or South wing of 
the sun-bird starting on her southern journey 2 . And that 
this meaning of the two forms of the Brihati metre was that 
actually present in the minds of the authors of the ritual 
is indubitably proved by the statement in the SatapatJia 
Brdhmana that the year of sacrifice " amounts to a Brihati," 
that is to say, that the year is measured by the Brihati 
metre 3. The Bridget of the South Queen of the winter 
solstice and goddess of the first six months season of the 
Pleiades year is in the southern form of her story the ruler 
of the year and of the southern birth-land of life. It is 
she, the Akkadian goddess Ninlil, the lady of the dust, 
the Sabaean queen Beltis, the lady of Sheba, who goes 
northward to become the May Queen in the North, where 
she is to meet the Northern father-god, her partner in 
the star dance. He in the Irish legendary history is Bres, 
the war {bres) king of the Fomori, or men born under 
(fo) the sea {muiri), that is the king of the Southern 
people whose day was our night, those who lived on the 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Bra/i., i. 7, 2, 17 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 196, note 2, 

2 Ibid., ix. 1, 2, 36, vol. xliii. p. 179. 

3 Ibid., xii. 2, 3, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 155, 156. 

4 Rhys, Hibbcrt Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. pp. 591 — 593. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 71 

under or south side of the tortoise earth with its Northern 
mother-mountain topped by the Pole Star in the centre. 
They were the men of the land of the mud whence the 
world's tree grew, to whose country the sun and moon gave 
light after they sunk at their setting into the sea. They 
are the sea-people of the Arabian Nights Tale of Badr 
Basim, the smiling Full Moon (badr), son of Julnar, the 
pomegranate (Jul), the sea-maiden whose mother was 
Fara'shah, the night moth. He, as the son of an earth-born 
father, king of Khorasan, succeeded to this kingdom on 
his father's death, and thus was ruler of the lands bordering 
the Persian Gulf, those civilised by la, the god clothed 
in fish-skins, who arose from the sea. Badr Basim, the 
Full Moon, was wedded, like his father, to a daughter of 
the sea, Jauharah (the jewel), child of Al-Shamandal, the 
Salamander, who dwelt under the ocean in the fiery land 
which heated the Cauldron of Life in the Southern waters 
whence the sun drew its heat x . She was the counterpart 
of the Vedic sun-maiden Savitrl, who was wedded (Rg. 
x. 85) to Soma, the moon-god, and who was brought to 
the wedding on the year-car of the Ashvins, as the bride 
of the ruling god of the lunar-solar year, which I shall 
describe in Chapter VII. 

The wife of the thunder-god Bres, king of the Fomori, 
is Brig or Brigit, daughter of Dagda. Their son is Ruadan, 
meaning the red one (mad) or the roarer (rud 2 ), the. Vedic 
Rudra, who was slain by Goibniu, the smith-god of the 
Tuatha De Danann, whom he tried to kill. The story 
is one which marks in its conception of the union between 
the year-star and sun-goddesses, and the men who dwelt 
beneath the sea, its origin in the legends of a Dravidian 
maritime race who were born from the union of parents 
who habitually lived apart from one another in separate 
villages, like the fathers and mothers of Dravidian children. 



1 Burton, Arabian Nights, Library Edition, vol. vi. pp. 54—95- 
c Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1S86, Lect. v. pp. 388, 389, note 2. 



J2 History and Chronoiogy 

The year of Bran, the raven who ran away on the first 
of November with the Pleiades' mother, the Greek Per- 
sephone, the Celtic Bridget, who was to be the May Queen 
of the second season of the year, reappears again in that 
rich mine of ancient year-history, the Arthurian Legend. 
The captive queen was the lady Gwenhwyvar, the white 
(gwen) spirit or ghost {hwyvar). She, like Bridget, was the 
third of three ladies of the same name who were all wives 
of Arthur or Airem, the plough-god x . Her father, the 
giant Ogyrvan, was the god said in the Taliessin poems 
to make cauldrons boil without the aid of fire, that is to say, 
he was the Salamander god of the story of Julnar and Badr 
Basim, the god of the fire drill, who heated the Southern 
Cauldron of Life. 

He was the reputed inventor of the Welsh Ogam letters 
composed of the elements represented in the primitive Celtic 
sign of the parent of knowledge /j\ 2 . It is the equivalent 

of the caste mark of the Hindu Vishnu worshippers \JJ 

with its red centre and yellow lateral lines, also of the 
earliest Akkadian sign for woman fX on the monuments 

of Girsu 3. And of the Cypriote sign of the arrow of life 
{ti) the Akkadian Zi /J\4. It represents the converging 

two seasons of the original year- meeting at the summer 
centre, whence the seed of future life was to be born. 

The Gwenhwyvar daughter of this parent of wisdom, the 
white ghost of winter, was captured by Medrod the Judge 
or Archer (medr-u), the counterpart of the Pole Star god 
Danu, and the god of the year-arrow., in which, accor- 



1 Rhys, 77ie Arthurian Legend, chap. ii. pp. 34 — 39. 

2 Ibid., Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iii. pp. 267, 268. 

3 Amiand et Mechanseau, Tableau Compares des Ecritures Babyloniennes et 
Assyrieunes, No. 163, p. 65. 

4 Conder, The Hittites and' their Language: Syllabary Sign 78. This was 
the sign originally placed on women's carriages in India when railways were 
first started. I do not know if it is still used. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 73 

ding to the Brahmanas, the point represents the winter x . He 
was also Melwas, the hero (mdl) king of the winter region, 
that is of the heat-giving south. In the story of Gwenhwy- 
var's capture it is represented as taking place in the month of 
May, and her original releaser was Gawain, a form of the 
original Gwalchmei, the hawk of May. Thus the story clearly 
tells of two year-kings, the king of winter, Medrod or Melvas, 
who seizes the May Queen at the beginning of her year in 
November, and carries her to his southern realm. He takes 
her back with him in his northern progress till he is obliged to 
give her up to her true husband, the sun-prince of summer 2 . 
But this hawk of May belongs to the second form of the two 
early years of two seasons. He was in his original form the 
sun-bird, the hen of the Mundas, who starts on her yearly 
course at the winter solstice, and thus pursues a different 
path through the stars than that marked out for the raven- 
bird Canopus in Argo. The course of the sun-bird began 
at the South-west under the control of the directing ape-god ; 
the giant form of Canopus. In this phase of ancient belief 
he was called by the Arabians Repha, the giant, and the 
course of the sun he directed was watched by his brethren 
the two dog-stars, Sirius and Procyon. The former of these 
stars is that called in the Akkadian Epic of Gilgames, the 
sun-giant, Lig la the dog (lig) of la, who embarked with 
Gilgames on the ship Ma, the constellation Argo, to 
cross the sea of Samas, the sun stream flowing down the 
Milky Way. The western side of the crossing was guarded 
by Procyon, called Pallika, the crossing of the water-dog 3. 

It was from the crossing place guarded by these two dog- 
stars that the sun was believed by the primitive astronomers 
to start on her yearly journey from South to North at the 
winter solstice, and thence to cross the heavens by the 

1 Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap. ii. pp. 38, 39; Eggeling, Sat. Bran., 
ii. 4, 4, 14 — 17; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 108. 

2 Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap. Hi., Gwenhwyvar and her Captors, 
pp. 49 ff. 

3 R. Brown, jun. , Eridanus River and Constellation, p. 13 : Primitive 
Constellations, p. 279. 



74 History and Chronology 

Bridge of the Gods, the Milky Way, the road of the cows 
of light. This mythic route of the primitive sun-bird is 
symbolically marked out every day by all Indian Brahmins. 
Each of them before his daily meal draws a circle on the 
ground, into which he places a portion of his food, as an 
offering to the Vaishva-deva, the tree and star-gods of life 
protecting the circle round the village grove. Outside the 
circle at the North-west corner he places an offering to 
the dog Shabala, and at the South-west corner to the dog 
Shyama x . These two dogs are the Sanskrit Sharvara, the 
spotted dog Sirius, and Saramaya, the yellow dog Procyon 
also called Shvan the dog, and Prashvan the fore-dog. In 
the Zendavesta they are the yellow dogs who guard the 
Chinvat Bridge, the dogs of Sarama their mother, who, with 
Yama, the twins night and day, the two birds on the world's 
tree guard the sun's path in the Rigveda 2 . Their mother 
Sarama, the bitch of the gods who seeks the cows of light 
is apparently from her connection with the two dog-stars, 
the constellation Argo, just as this constellation is in 
Arabian astronomy their brother. It was these two dogs 
who as Procyon from the South-west, and Sirius from the 
North-west, guarded the sun as he started from the South- 
west on his northern journey at the winter solstice, and 
also his return from the North-west, where he set his face 
homewards at the summer solstice. 

The sun-myth thus conceived was originally that taught 
by the Dravido-Mundas, the sons of Canopus, the giant ape, 
called by the Arabians Repha the giant. They became 
the Rephaim of Syria, whose history and astronomy will be 
told in the next Chapter, which tells the story of the intro- 
duction into Europe of the communal villages of the 
Neolithic age organised after the original Dravidian pattern. 
But these sons of Repha, the giant star Canopus, before 
or almost simultaneously with their settlement in Syria, 

1 Bal Gungadhur Tilak Orion. 

3 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendidad Fargard, viii. 16, 17; S.B.E., vol. iv. 
p. 97 ; Introduction, v. 4, pp. Ixxvii., Ixxviii. ; Rg. x. 14, IO, 11. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 75 

came to Egypt as the first founders of communal villages 
and organisers of the nomes or provinces into which it was 
divided. In the Egyptian astronomy the two gods who 
ruled the South were Set and Nebt-hat, the mistress (iiebt) 
of the house {hat), the counterpart of Hat-hor, the Pole Star 
mother or house (hat) of Hor or Horus the Supreme god, 
and hence the mother-tree or house-pole with its top in the 
Pole Star. With them was their father Turn, meaning the 
end or completion, bearing the sceptre, the creating magic 
wand x . He is the male form of Bahu, the creating bird, 
while Nebt-hat is the mother-tree growing from the mud 
of Bahu, and Set the ape-god on it. He is called in the 
Book of the Dead, Chapter xcix., Hapi the ape, and in the 
story of his fight with Horus 2 he becomes Suti the black pig. 
As Suti he is Sutekh, the god of the Hyksos or leaders (hah) 
of the Sos or Shasus, the Syrian herdsmen, the Rephaim 
of Palestine. A temple built to him as Khons at Thebes 
is oriented to Canopus 3. He, as Sutekh, had a temple at 
Memphis 4, and the port of the Nile Delta before the foun- 
dation of Alexandria was called the port of Canopus, the 
ape-star-father of the ape-gods of Egypt. It was when 
the star Canopus could no longer be seen by his votaries 
who had settled in northern lands where he was no longer 
visible, that they looked to the North Pole Star as the 
centre-star of heaven which replaced their Southern father. 
This Pole Star was the star in Kepheus, the constellation 
of the ape whose Thigh extended to the Great Bear. It 

1 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien sEgypler, p. 451. 
- Budge, Book of the Dead, lxii. 6, p. 177. 

3 Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap, xviii. p. 184 ; Temple, 1. pp. 1S6, 187. 
There are also two other temples at Thebes oriented to Canopus. Lockyer, 
Dawn of Astronomy, p. 189. These temples were oriented to the setting of 
Canopus {Dawn of Astronomy, pp. 223, 224), and we have seen in the history 
of the Pleiades year, beginning with the setting of the Pleiades, that its 
authors observed the setting and not the rising of the stars. Hence Canopus 
is marked as one of the year-stars of the primaeval age. 

4 Maspero, Histoire Ancienne des peuples de VOrient, Troisieme Edition, 

P- 175- 



y6 History and Chronology of the Myth-Making Age. 

ruled both the North and South when Osiris, who was 
afterwards the rival of the ape Pole Star god, was the star 
Orion ruling the year of three seasons of Chapter III. 
Osiris, as god of Orion's year, the god with the two eyes 
of the Northern and Southern sun, was slain on the date 
of his death festival held on the 26th of Choiak (September — 
October), four days before that of the snake-god Nahib-ka 
on the 1st Tybi (October — November), the first month of the 
Pleiades year z . His slayer was Set or Hapi, with his 
seventy-two assistants, the seventy-two weeks of the year, 
and it was to avenge his death that Horus, son of the mother 
Pole Star, fought Suti, who assumed in the contest the form 
of a pig. We find the explanation of this transformation 
in the history of the constellation Kepheus, which became 
the Phoenician constellation Baal Tzephon or Zaphon, the 
Baal of the North, worshipped, according to Maspero, at 
Memphis. He was the Typhon of the Greeks, the god of the 
deadly storm, whose name survives in our word Typhoon. 
This wind of Baal Zephon, whose temple was on Mount Kasios 
on the coast of Syria, was the South-west hot wind blowing 
from the borders of Egyptover Syria from the month of June— 
July, called in Syriac Cheziron or the month of the Pig, till 
the middle of September 2 . This wind of the boar-god was 
that which slew Adonis at Antioch at the autumnal equinox, 
and the god who sent the wind was the ape-god of the Pole 
Star constellation Kepheus. He, when he ruled his southern 
votaries as the giant-star Repha Canopus, was the guider 
of the mother-ship Ma, the constellation Argo, through the 
southern heavens, who brought up the South west monsoon 
with the rains of the summer solstice which fertilised India, 
and this same South-west wind was that which burnt up 
Syria in the North and became the destroying pig-god. 

1 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien sEgypter, pp. 346, 303, 304. 
The relation of the Egyptian months to those of our calendar here assumed 
is that given on the oldest calendars of the pyramid builders, recording the 
names of the months and the three seasons to each of which four months 
Were allotted. Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap, xxiii. p. 233. 

2 Eerard, Origine des Ctiltes Arcadiens, pp. 228 ; Movers, Die Phonisiei' 
Vol. i. p. 224. 



CHAPTER III. 



The year of three seasons and five-day weeks 
ruled by Orion the deer-sun-god. 

THE Arabian story of the giant - star Canopus, called 
Repha, and of his two brothers Sirius and Procyon, 
of which I told the beginning in the last Chapter, goes on to 
tell of the marriage of Repha to Orion called El Schauza i , 
who here becomes a female, and of the breaking of the necks 
of her husband's two brothers by the bride. This denoue- 
ment, which means the abandonment of the astronomical 
belief in the Milky Way as a bridge over which the sun 
made his annual journeys from South to North and back 
again, shows that the Rephaim of Syria, sons of Canopus 
and Orion, changed the previous methods of time-measure- 
ment. But in order to understand this fully it is necessary 
to consider the information available as to the progress 
of the Munda-Dravidians in their new settlements in South- 
western Asia. They, when they left India, had made such 
progress in civilisation and the arts of government as to 
have established the province or associated confederacy 
of adjoining or related villages as the tribal unit. 

A. Progress of the Northern emigration of the Indian 
founders of villages. 

These emigrants, who landed originally at Eridu, distri- 
buted themselves over the Euphratean Delta in Parhas or 
provinces, each ruled by its central village, but we possess 
no data supplying us with the means of determining the 

1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i., chap, viii., pp. 289, 292, chap. x. p. 406. 



yS History and Chronology 

time thus occupied. Its duration was regulated by the 
numbers of the emigrants, and the more or less rapid addi- 
tion to their ranks made by the advent of new swarms, 
the increase arising from births and from alliances with 
the previous inhabitants if any existed. 

Each province had its own gods, those dwelling in the 
village groves, and each had its own annual series of pro- 
vincial and village seasonal festivals, regulated by the village 
Munda and the provincial Mankis, assisted by the provincial 
priest. This system of national growth prevailed over 
the Euphratean Delta, Babylonia and Mesopotamia, it 
divided the land of Egypt into Nomes, each ruled by 
its central city, and these Parhas or provinces became 
in Syria those described in the Book of Joshua, where, in 
the account of the conquest of the Jews, they are grouped 
under the names of the ruling cities with their associated 
villages r . The area of these Syrian provinces must, like 
the original Parhas of the Kolhan still existing in India, 
have been very small, for in the territory of the tribe of Judah 
there are one hundred and six cities mentioned, excluding 
those of the Philistines, and thus the average territory of 
each of these provinces, scattered over an area of about 
1,200 square miles, was only about eleven square miles. 

The sandy soil on the shores of the Persian Gulf, where 
the new immigrants first landed, was not so well adapted to 
the growth of rice as India, and hence one of their first tasks 
was to find a substitute better suited to the soil and climate. 
This they found in barley and wheat, which were originally 
wild Mesopotamia!! grasses changed by the Indian farmers 
into profitable crops by methods similar to those used by 
their forefathers, who had made the endless varieties of 
Indian rice out of the wild rice-grass, which every peasant 
in Central India still hangs up in his house in August when 
the young rice sprouts, as a memorial of the early tasks 
of the first pioneers of agriculture, and as a means of obtain- 

1 Joshua xv. 21— 62, 



of the Myth-Making Age. 79 

ing from the parent-gods of both plant and animal life 
prosperity during the future year. 

They also turned their attention to the domestication 
of farm cattle, and these formed the breeds of pigs, short- 
horn cattle, sheep and goats, which were introduced by their 
descendants into Europe in the Neolithic age, and which 
were originally inhabitants of Central Asia I . 

Their principal assistants in these tasks appear to have 
been the Finrt races, who, as the Akkadians or mountaineers, 
came in contact with the Indian immigrants at a yery early 
period. The latter were apparently diggers who cultivated 
the soil with the digging-stick, and the Finn people were 
pre-eminently a pastoral race, who learnt, in the icy regions 
of the North and the cold of the glacial age further South, 
to domesticate the rein-deer. It was they who introduced 
among the Southern races the belief in magic and witchcraft 
which is indigenous among all Finns, and was commu- 
nicated by them to the Mundas and Gonds in India, who are 
renowned wizards. They brought with them the Shamanist 
priest and his magic drum, which still survives among the 
Lapps, who ornament it with symbolic figures 2 ; and this 
is the musical instrument still most prominent in the sea- 
sonal dances of the Turano-Dravidian races. The population 
formed from their northern and southern elements were the 
people described in the Zendavesta as the wizard Yatus, who 
were created in the land of the Haetumant 3 or Helmend, 
rising in Khar-sak-karra, the mother mountain of the Akka- 
dians. They are called Yatudhana in the Rigveda 4, and in 
the Zendavesta the sons of Danu, the Danava of the Rigveda. 
They were the worshippers of the goddess Maga, the mother 
of magical arts, who gave to Sinai the Akkadian name 
of Mag-ana, who, in her male form, was Al Makah, the god 

1 Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, p. 300. 

2 Comparetti, The Traditional Poetry of the Finns, English Translation, 
p. 2S8. 

3 Darmesteter, Zendavesta VendTdad Fargard, i. 14; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 8. 

4 Rg. viii. 104, 15 — 25. 



8o History and Chronology 

of the Himyarite Sabaean Arabs x . She was the goddess of 
the land of Magog in the North - east of Asia Minor, 
the land to which the Rephaim ruled by Og, the king of 
Bashan, traced their origin. She was the virgin (magd, 
maid) mother-tree of the wizard races, the pine-tree. 

These wizard Finns brought with them the belief in to- 
temism, as they called themselves the sons of birds and 
animals, and looked on the mountains shrouded in mists 
and clouds as their mother-goddess, named by* them Is-tar, 
the daughter (tar) of heaven (is), the sky-mountain. These 
two races who thus met in the Euphrates valley were eth- 
nologically far apart. The Dravidians were a fairly tall 
doliko-kephalic race, with noses thicker and broader than 
those of any other human family except the negro, a low 
facial angle, thick lips, wide and fleshy faces, coarse irre- 
gular features, and little beard. Their figures were broad 
and their limbs sturdy, and their colour dark brown ap- 
proaching to black 2 . They were the Himyarites or black 
race of Southern Arabia. 

The Finns, on the other hand, were a brachy-kephalic 
yellow or brownish race, with round heads, low foreheads, 
prominent cheek-bones, with thick lips, short and flat nose, 
black hair and scanty beard 3. 

It was from the union of these two tribes that the Gaurian 
race of Girsu was produced. They, as described from their 
features depicted on the monuments, had " round heads, 
low, straight and wide foreheads, slightly prominent cheek- 
bones, an orthognate profile, with fleshy lips, a big but not 
aquiline nose, and hair like that of the Dravidians, rather 
curly than wavy 4. They thus resembled the primitive Satyrs 
of Asia Minor, having the same smooth faces and generally 
short stature, but their hair was more curly than that of the 

1 Tiele, Outlines of the History of Ancient Religions : The Sabceans, § 48, p. 79. 
3 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. Preface, p. 32. 

3 J. S. Keltie, ' Finland,' Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. ix. p. 219. 

4 G. Bert, in ' The Races of the Babylonian Empire.' Journal of the An- 
thropological Institute, Nov., 1889, p. 106, 



of the Myth- Making Age. 8 1 

Dravidians. They got their coarse features, large noses, 
fleshy lips and curly hair from the doliko-kephalic Dravi- 
dians, and their round heads and short bodies from the 
brachy-kephalic Finns. 

These Gaurian races of the Euphrates valley adopted 
this name in India as the Gond descendants of the 
goddess Gauri, the wild bison (Bos G aunts), who is not 
only the mother-goddess of the Gonds, but a goddess 
popularly worshipped throughout Western India. But 
among the early founders of organised national life in 
Mesopotamia there also appear a third race, that of the 
archers, who use the bow which became the national 
weapon of the Persians. These appear in Western India 
as the Bhils, or men of the bow (billa), who were certainly 
not an indigenous Indian tribe. The purest specimens 
of the race are generally tall with regular features and 
wavy hair, and they are intensely devoted to the dog,' 
their hunting companion ; and no Bhil will dare to break 
an oath made when his hand is placed on the head of 
his dog 1 . These men of the bow early obtained a com- 
manding position in Assyria, for the tall, bearded archer 
standing between the sun's rays, shooting upwards from 
the two oxen beneath his feet, is the topmost figure in 
the Assyrian standard 2 . 

B. The men of the boiv. 

Neither this arrow- shooting race, who intermixed with 
the Mundas and taught them the use of the bow, nor their 
national weapon, were of Indian origin. The original Dra- 
vidian weapon was the boomerang, while that of the Mundas, 
who are called in the Mahabharata the sons of the hill-bam- 
boo Kichaka, was probably the male bamboo club, the lathi, 
which in the competent hands of the Indian lathyals and 

1 Hunter, Gazetteer of India, Bhil Tribes, vol. ii. pp. 389, 390. 

2 Maspero, Ancient Egypt and Assyria. Assyrian Standard, Fig. 153, 
P- 326. 

G 



82 History and Chronology 

of the old English proficients in the use of the quarter-staff, 
is one of the most formidable of weapons. This was the 
weapon of Duryodhana, the eldest Kauravya prince and 
leader of their army, and therefore that of the Kaur tribes, 
who are the warriors of Chutia Nagpur and Chuttisgurh, 
and also that of the Pandava Bhima, the son of Maroti, 
the Gond ape-god, also called in the Mahabharata, brother 
of Hanuman, the striker (Jianu), the Hindu name of Maroti. 
Bhima, who is the Gond father-god, and the god popularly 
worshipped throughout Eastern India, was in the Pandava 
war waged for the conquest of India, the conqueror of the 
East, the home of the Munda or Malli races I . The bow, 
which is useless without its string, could only have been 
invented in a forest country where fibrous grasses fit for 
bow-strings abounded, for they must have preceded animal 
cat-gut, which has since been sometimes used. That the 
string of the Indian bow was originally made of grass fibre 
is proved by the fact that the girdle with which Indian 
kshatryas or warriors are invested at eleven years old as 
a sign of manhood, is made of Murva {Sanseviera Zeylanica), 
the hemp used for making bow-strings, and it is composed 
of three strands to represent the three seasons of the year, 
of which the history is told in this Chapter 2 . The race who 
invented the bow must have been a hunting people, ac- 
customed to kill quadrupedal game such as deer. They 
could never have thought out the structure and use of this 
weapon in the treeless plains of Central Asia, where the 
necessary grasses did not abound, and it was only in a damp 
tropical climate that these could be found ready to hand, and 
exhibiting their tenacity to all who tried to force their way 
through the tangled thickets of the forests. But if the bow 
was not invented in tropical Asia, the only other tropical 

1 Mahabharata Shalya (Gadayttdka) Parva, lv. — lviii. pp. 211 — 228. Adi 
{Sambhava) Parva, xcv. p. 286. Vana (Tirt/ia Yaira) Parva, cxlv. p. 439. 
Sabha (Digvijaya) Parva, xxix., xxx. pp. 84 — 87. 

2 Biihler, Manu, ii. 42; S.B. E., vol. xxv. p. 37; Hewitt, s Ruling Races 
of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. p. 405* 



of the Myth-Making Age. 83 

forest country within the purview of ancient geography 
whence it could have come is Central Africa. There the bow 
has always been the indigenous weapon from time imme- 
morial, and it is among the Bantu pastoral tribes of Africa 
and in India that we find the one-stringed musical bow, the 
earliest musical instrument known ; that still played by 
the Mundas of Chutia Nagpur at their national dances, 
called Pinga in Rigveda viii. 58 (69), 7-9 I , and that called 
in the Hindu ritualistic mythology the Pinaka or sacred bow 
of Shiva 2 . This is the three-eyed trident-bearing aboriginal 
god, who in the scene in the Mahabharata which describes 
Arjuna's visit to heaven to obtain the weapons of Indra, 
appears before him in the form of a Kirata, or hunter, 
accompanied by Uma, {flax), the mother of the weaving 
races, and crowds of women dancing to the music of his 
bow, with which his Gond representative, Lingal, had taught 
the aboriginal man of the forest, Rikad Gowadi, and his wife 
to dance 3. This god approached Arjuna as he was con- 
tending with the boar-god of winter (the boar who ends 
the year of three seasons by slaying Adonis the year-sun), 
and it was slain by the simultaneously launched arrows 
of Shiva and of Arjuna, who is among the Pandava brethren 
the god of the rainy season beginning at the summer 
solstice 4. 

This trident-bearing three-eyed god, who is represented 
as riding on a bull, and who is the only Hindu god always 
depicted with a white faces, is the Hindu equivalent of 
the wild-bull, father of the Gaurian race of Girsu, whose 

sign on the monuments is '\t] b , and who is called Gud-Ia, 

1 Hewitt, Riding Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. p. 205, note I. 

* H. Balfour, The Natural History of the Musical Bow, pp. 5 — 36, 54, 64, 65. 

3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 48,49. 

4 Mahabharata Vana (Arj?mdbhigamana) Parva, xxxvii. p. 117. Vana 
[Kairata) Parva, xxxix. pp. 120, 121. 

5 Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, chap, xv., 
vol. i. p. 126. 

Amiand et Mechinseau, Tableau Comparee des Ecriiures Babyloniennes et 
Assyriennes, no. 49, p. 19. 

G 2 



84 History and Chronology 

or the bull la. He is the father-god of the red race, the sons 
of Rohini, the star Aldebaran, the red cow, who was first, as 
we shall see, the doe-mother who gave to Assyria its earliest 
name of Gutium, the land of the bull (gut), and who was 
the father of the Hindu Gautama, the sons of the cow (go), 
who were first sons of Gauri, the wild - cow. This is the 
three-eyed bull, the Semiramis or Samirus of Babylon, 
a bisexual form of Istar, described in a legend quoted by 
Lenormant as having three eyes and two horns, who suc- 
ceeded Nimrod or Ninus, the hunting - star Orion, in 
Babylon, invented weights and measures, and the art of 
weaving silk x , which was first made from the tusser cocoons 
of the Indian forests. 

This weaving-god of the year of three seasons, whose wife 
is Uma (flax), is the god of the Hindu tribe called Shiva, who 
were the allies of the pre-Aryan Bharata, and were conquered 
at the battle of the ten kings described in the Rigveda by 
the Tritsu or fire-rubbers (trit) 2 , whose high priest was 
Vashishtha, the fire-god of the perpetual fire burning on the 
altar of the later worshippers of the sun-god as an inde- 
pendent gocl ruling the year and marking his own annual 
path round the heavens instead of being dragged as a day- 
star round the Pole. They are the people called Seboi by 
Strabo, who lived on the Indus north of the Chlnab, and 
it was their king Sopeithes who gave Alexander the Great 
a present of fighting dogs 3. In India their father-god Shiva 
is called the son of Ushlnara, or man (nard) of the East, 
a name both of the parent-god and of the people called by 
this name in the Rigveda 4 ; and that he was the father-god 
of a fair Northern race who brought to India the flax of Asia 
Minor is proved by the epithet Sveta, or the white one, 
applied to him in the Brahmanas 5. 

1 Lenormant, Chaldcean Magic and Sorcery, Appendix, p. 396, note 2. 

2 Rg. vii. 18, 7. 

3 Cunningham, Ancient Geography oj India, pp. 157, 158. 

4 Rg. x. 59, 18. 

5 Monier Williams, Religions Thought and Life in India, chap. iv. p. 80, 
note 2, 



of the Myth- Making Age. 85 

The Indian god Shiva or Shiba, father of the Sebo , 
appears in the Ural-Altaic astronomy of the Akkadians 
as the third star in their seven Lumasi or parent-stars, the 
star Sib-zi-ana, Arcturus, the shepherd (sib) of the life (zi) 
of the god (and), that is of the young sun-god cradled in the 
first of these parent constellations, Su-gi, the Star of the 
Wain or the Great Bear, and tended by the second Lumasi 
Ud-gudua, the sun (ud) of Gudua, the city of the dead, the 
Akkadian national cemetery. This is the constellation 
Virgo I , the mother of corn, depicted in Akkadian astrono- 
mical imagery as holding an ear of corn in her hand, and 
as crowned by a snake whose tail hangs down her back 2 . 
These three creating stars are : The shepherd-star Arc- 
turus in Bootes and his virgin-wife the tree-mother of corn, 
the constellation Virgo, and the sun-god born of this tree- 
mother and concealed in the constellation of the Wain called 
Su-gi, or, the reed (gi) of the bird (su or khii). In this birth 
story the myth of Demeter and Persephone is transferred 
to the North. The waste ocean void of the Southern 
goddess Bahu, into which Persephone is conveyed for her 
winter sleep, becomes here the reed-cradle of the Great Bear 
in the lake filled by the river Haetumant or Helmend, rising 
in the Akkadian mother-mountain, Khar-sak-kurra, whence 
Kavad, the parent of the Kushika race, was born. The 
lamenting Demeter becomes the watching and guarding star 
Virgo, while the ravisher of the summer sun becomes the 
guardian star Arcturus, the finder of the young sun-god 
under the guise of the goat Uzava, who found Kavad 3. 

This shepherd star-god who finds the lost lamb of his 
flock is called in the Rigveda, Aryaman, the Zend Airya- 
man. This star is said in the description in the Vishnu 
Dharma of the constellation Shlmshu mara, or the alligator 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 359 — 362. 

2 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Remarks on the Constellation Virgo,' reprinted 
from the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, Figs. vi. and vii. p. 14, representing 
Istar-Virgo. 

3 West, Bundahish, xxxi. 24 ; S.B. E., vol. v. p. 136. 



86 History and Chronology 

which turns the stars round the Pole, to be the western foot 
of the constellation \ It is the star of the ploughing (ar) 
race of the growers of corn, the Mesopotamian barley and 
wheat grown by the Euphratean farmer pupils of the Indian 
emigrants. This male father-star, called Sib by the 
Akkadians and Shiva or Shiba by their conquerors in 
India, is the father Saiv, worshipped, as Castren tells us, by 
all the Ural-Altaic tribes as their supreme god 2 . The ruling 
section of this Akkadian Sumerian confederacy formed 
by the alliance of the Indian farmers, the Finn wizard 
races and the hunters of the North, were the archers, the 
sons of Shiva or Saiv, the god of the musical bow. It was 
these hunting warriors who became the sons of Kush, the 
father of Nimrod or Orion, the hunting-star-god, and their 
genealogy is told in the name of the Kushite or Kushika 
race. For their subsequent parent Kush the tortoise was 
originally the Arabic kaus, the bow, the Assyrian kastu, 
'the Hebrew kausitu, and they were thus the sons of the bow. 
They can be traced back in prehistoric ethnology to the 
tall race called the men of Cro-Magnon, of whom the 
earliest skeletons yet discovered were found at Cro-Magnon 
on the Vezere, in the Department of Dordogne in France 3. 
Their remains date back to an early period in the 
Palaeolithic Age, and they represent the first people who 
systematically shot flint arrows from their bows, though 
arrows pointed with ivory were used by the still earlier men 
of the Spy Onoz cave in Belgium. But bows and arrows 
were unknown to the later Mesato-Kephalic races of Furfooz 
belonging to the rein-deer age, as no traces of them have 
been found, according to M. Dupont, in their caves on the 
Liesse. 



1 Sachau, Alberuni's India, vol. i. chap. ii. p. 242. 

2 Castren, as quoted by R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Etruscan Inscriptions 
of Lemnos,' p. 14, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeology, April, 
1888, says Saiv is among the Finns an " Allgemeines Gotter epithet." 

3 De Quatrefages, The Hitman Species, chap, xxvii., The Cro-Magnon Race, 
PP- 3M, 315- 



of the Myth-Making Age. 87 

This tall race of bowmen, with fine open foreheads and 
large, narrow, aquiline noses, are shown by their skulls to 
be intimately allied to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, 
the Kabyles of the Beni Masser and Djurjura, and the 
long-headed Basques of North Spain r . It was they 
apparently who founded the widely-spread Bantu stock 
of Africa, and who made their way through Europe to 
Asia Minor and the Euphrates valley. The aquiline nose 
introduced by them has become the aquiline nose of the 
Semites, which is owing to their Dravidian parentage, not 
like the Cro-Magnon nose, thin and narrow, but thick and 
broad. 

These confederated tribes, the growers of barley and 
wheat, and the possessors of cattle, sheep and goats bred 
from Central Asian wild stocks, distributed themselves over 
Elam or Persia and the Euphratean countries, forming 
provincial groups of allied villages depending on their 
central capital. Some of these were peopled by purer 
races, and some by those who were more or less mixed, and 
each of these provincial divisions had its own ritual and its 
own measurements of annual time based upon the ancestral 
teachings of the dominant tribe, with variations introduced 
by the influence of the aliens received into the territory 
of the group. 

C. Substitution of Orion for Canopus as the leading star -god. 

As they advanced northwards up the Euphrates valley 
the Dravidian farmers lost sight of their parent-star Canopus, 
which disappeared from the night sky in the latitude of the 
Northern Egyptian coast, and it was the disappearance 
of Canopus which led to the substitution of Orion for 
Canopus as the leader of the stars, an event alluded to 
in the story of the marriage of Canopus and Orion quoted 
at the beginning of this Chapter. In the belief framed 

1 De Quatrefages, The Human Species, chap, xxvii., The Cro-Magnon Race, 
P- 335- 



8& History and Chronology 

on this change of the star-leader it was Orion who hunted 
the Pleiades and their attendant stars round the Pole, 
instead of dragging them round as Canopus was believed 
to do. 

The image of the hunting-god, originally the great storm- 
god who drove the stars round the Pole, is one which 
originated among the hunting races of the North, whom the 
Southern farmers met in Asia Minor. These were the cave 
men of the Palaeolithic age, the mixed descendants of the 
doliko-kephalic Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon races, and the 
brachy-kephalic men of Furfooz on the Liesse in Belgium. 
They had during the Palaeolithic age domesticated the 
rein-deer, which furnished them with food, clothes and 
implements, and they had made the rein-deer sun-god the 
ruler of their year. The dropping of his horns in autumn 
told them of the approach of winter, and their re-growth 
in spring heralded the coming summer. The prophet-god 
who spoke by these signs became the Celtic sun-god Cer- 
nunnos, whose forehead is adorned with deer's horns in the 
images of him engraved on his altars found at Paris, Rheims, 
Sountes and Vendceuvres en Brenne l . That these horns 
were originally rein-deer horns is to be inferred from the 
great antiquity of the myth of this god, who was originally 
the English Heme the Hunter, and also from local ritual. 
For at his festival, which took place at the winter solstice, 
rein-deer horns are at least in one place in England, Abbot's 
Bromley in Staffordshire, used to decorate the head of the 
representative of the sun-god 2 . 

This horned deer-god was the god Frey ot the Edda, who 
fights with his deer horns, and is said in the Edda to have 
been with his father Njord, the North Pole god, and his 
twin sister Freya, the sun-hawk, taken from Asia Minor to 
the North in exchange for Hcenir the sun-horse 3. 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures jor 1886, Lect. i. pp. 78, 79. 

- Miss Burnes, 'Staffordshire Folk and their Lore,' Folklore, vol. vii., for 
1896, p. 3§3- 

3 Mallet, Northern Antiquities. The Prose Edda, pp. 418 — 420, 460. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 89 

The annual festival of the end and beginning of the year 
of this deer-sun-god is celebrated at the winter solstice, and 
in those parts of Scandinavia and North Germany where 
the primitive year festivals still survive, it begins twelve days 
before that date, and ends with a drama acted on the 
afternoon before the solstice which begins at six o'clock 1 . 
Before the fatal hour which ends the year of the sun-god, 
he is disguised as a deer, and courts a woman disguised as 
a doe. They sing ribald songs together till the last moments 
of the year arrive, and then the sun-god seizes the doe, and 
as he attacks her he was shot formerly by the arrow, but 
now by the ball of the Wild Hunter. 

The variant forms of this story which originated in the 
North prove that it has been carried all over the world 
by the descendants of the Archer race, who believed in the 
deer-sun-god. It appears in India in the tale told in the 
Aitareya Brahmana, iii. 33. This relates that Prajapati the 
lord (pati) of cultivators (praj'd), the star Orion in the form 
of a deer, pursued his daughter Rohini, the star Aldebaran 
(who was, it will be remembered, the Queen of the Pleiades) 
in the form of a doe. This was at the end of Mriga-sirsha 
(November — December), the month of the deer's (mriga) head 
(sirsha), ending with the winter solstice. He violated her, and 
as he did so he was shot with the " three-knotted " arrow of 
Rudra, the three stars in Orion's belt, and both these stars and 
the arrow indicate the three seasons of the year, the feather the 
spring, the shaft the summer, and the barb the winter 2 . From 
this union there was born, according to Rigveda x. 61, 7, 
Vastos-pati, the lord (pati) of the house (vastos), the house- 
hold fire, the god of the Finn Tartar races, who all worship 
the household fire, of which the house-mother is the priestess. 
It was she who offered a yearly libation to the household fire 



1 'Letter from Professor Kuhn to Dr. Rajenchalal Mitra,' Indo-Aryans, 
vol. ii. pp. 300 — 302. 

= Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. I, 2, 8, 9, iii. 4, 4, 14—17; S.B.E., vol. xii.p. 284, 
note 1, xxvi. p. 108, note 2. 



9O History and Chronology 

at the festival of the jonla held at the winter solstice x . The 
god of the household fire, the sun-god born to replace the 
dead deer-sun as the ruler of the next year, became, ac- 
cording to Stanzas 17, 18 of the hymn recording his birth, 
Nabhl-nedishtha, the nearest (nedishthd) to the navel {nab hi), 
the central fire on the altar 2 . The story of the pursuit by 
Orion of the Queen of the Pleiades appears also in the 
Boeotian tale of his pursuit of the seven daughters of 
Pleione, who were changed into the Peleiades, the Pleiades 
doves. 

It is told also in an Australian version, related by the 
Kamilaroi, a marrying tribe. Their complicated system of 
inter-marriage between a constantly changing circle of related 
groups, marks it as a form modified from the original matri- 
archal marriage of villages. In the Kamilaroi system the 
confederated clans take the place of the matriarchal village 
groups, in which the men of one village begot the children 
of another village to which the children's mothers belonged 3. 
Their story of Orion, whom they call Berri-berri, tells how 
he pursued the Miai-miai, the Pleiades. They took refuge 
in a tree, the mother-tree, where they became white and 
yellow parroquets. Berri-berri climbed after them, but they 
were protected from his violence by Turum-bulum, the one- 
legged and one-eyed Pole Star god, who here takes the 
place of the Wild Hunter and Rudra in the Scandinavian 
and Indian variants 4. 

This is the one-footed, one-eyed Annamite god called D'oc 
Cu'o'c, who slew the fox of Cu'ong nam, the destroyer of 
men, the constellation of the fox or hare Lepus at the foot 
of Orion ; that is to say, he slew Orion when his year's term, 
measured by the moon-fox, and its phases was ended. 
D'oc Cu'o'c is the god who gives rain to the earth, and to 
whom two cocks are sacrificed, the cocks sacrificed to the 

2 Lenormant, Chaldcean Magic, chap. xvi. p. 249. 

2 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii. , pp. 169, 170. 

3 The system is described by Elie Reclus, Le Primilif d^Australie, pp. 
159 ff. « Ibid., pp. 304, 305, 320. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 91 

sun-god of the solstitial sun by the Indian Mundas whose 
original home was in the mountains of South China, north 
of the Annamite country 1 . 

Another version of the shooting of the deer-year-god with 
the arrow, which is told in the Sama Jataka, clears up several 
difficult points in the history of this widely distributed 
story 2 . It tells how the Buddha sun-god was born in 
a former existence as the sun-deer Sama of the race of 
the Nishadhas, that is of the race who did not adore the sun- 
god Ashadha of the year beginning with the month of that 
name at the summer solstice, the history of which will be 
told in Chapter IV. The year of the deer-sun began at 
the winter solstice, and during it he lived with his blind 
father and mother on the banks of the river Mriga-sammata, 
that is of the united (sam) deer (mriga). 

His father and mother were ascetics who had taken the 
vow of chastity, that is to say belonged to that evolution 
of the Northern doctrine of fire-worship which laid stress 
on the merit of absolute chastity, as an imitator of the sexless 
fire drill and socket, the gods creating the holy fire. Their 
son was begotten by the father passing his hand over the 
navel of the mother, an idea derived from the supposed birth 
of life from the central navel of the world, the Southern 
mother-tree or fire-block, made pregnant by the rotation of 
the heavenly fire drill. This deer-sun-god born of the blind 
Northern father and Southern mother was shot, among his 
attendant deer, as the herd came down to drink the water 
of the deer-river, by an arrow from the bow of a hunter 
called Piliyakkha. This Piliyakkha, who takes the part of 
Rudra and the Wild Hunter, is described as a king of 
Kashi {Benares), but his name gives a clue to the origin of 
this form of the story of the death of the sun-deer. 
Piliyakko means in Pali, the Plaksha or Pakar tree {Ficus 

1 M. G. Dumoutier, Etudes d' ' Elhnographie Religieust Annamite Le Genie 
mi Pied unique, Actes du Onzieme Congres des Orientalistes, sect. Extreme 
Orient B. , vol. ii. pp. 275, 276, 278, 280. 

2 A. St. John, ' The Savanna Sama Jataka,' or the Birth Story of Sama 
of the race (vauua) of the Sus. f.R.A.S., 1894, pp. 213 ff. 



92 History and Chronology 

infectoria), the sacred fig-tree which consecrates the place 
of pilgrimage and sacrifice called Puryag at the junction 
of the Jumna and Ganges. The branches of this tree were 
laid as a covering of the altar roofed with sheaves of Kusha 
grass, when animal sacrifices were offered on it x . The 
place of pilgrimage consecrated to this mother-tree of the 
sacrifices of animal victims was the meeting-place where 
the Turanian Gonds, who killed animals in sacrifice, and 
who came down the Jumna, consummated their union with 
the previously united Munda-Dravido people, and formed 
the confederacy of the Kushika Naga race, whose capital 
was Kashi (Benares). 

Sama was, at the prayer of his slayer Piliyakkha, recalled 
to life as the sun-god of the new year by the goddess Bahu- 
sundari, the beautiful Bahu, the Akkadian mother-goddess 
of the Southern abyss of waters, the cauldron of life, and 
she came down to bring back the sun-god to the rule of 
the year from the mountain, the mother-mountain of the 
Turanian races, born from the Cave-Cybele, whom they 
worshipped as their mother. 

This story is evidently a Hindu variant of the European 
legend of St. _; Hubert converted by the deer with the cross 
between its horns, which he was about to shoot, of which 
another variant is told, in which the repentant slayer of 
the deer is called St. Placidus, commander in Asia Minor 
of the armies of the Emperor Trajan 2 . And the proof 
of the relation between the two stories is given in the 
annexed picture of the story of St. Hubert by Albert 
Durer. Here we see the hunter Piliyakkha, St. Hubert, on 
one side of the stream of the Mriga-Sammata ; on the 
other side stands the deer he slew, and above is the 
mountain castle of the goddess Bahu-Sundari, who resus- 
citated the dead deer-sun. I will now show the origin of 
the legend. Though this Asia Minor version, and the 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iii. 3, 3, 10 — 12 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 202, 203. 

2 Gaster, ' The Nigrodha Miga Jataka and the Life of St. Placidus, 5 f.R.A.S., 
I894. P- 336. 



PLATE I. 



To face p. 92. 




From the Picture by Albert Durer. 
The Conversion of St. Hubert, called in the Sama Jataka 

PlLIYAKKHA. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 93 

part taken in the Jataka story by the cave-mountain goddess 
would seem to point to Asia Minor, whence the god Frey 
was said in the Edda to go northward, as the place whence 
the legend originated, yet this is not a conclusion borne 
out by facts. The original national deer-god was most 
certainly the Celtic god Cernunnos, whose home was in 
Northern France and North-western Europe, and more 
especially in the Belgian country of the Ardennes. It is on 
the Meuse, about twelve miles to the west of the shrine 
of St. Hubert, the highest point of the elevated Ardennes 
region, called the Hautes Fagnes, that we find the shrine 
of the Eddie god in the cave of Frey, containing 
palaeolithic remains. Also the day consecrated to St. 
Hubert points to an ancient connection between the cult 
of the converted slayer of the year-deer and the original 
year of the Pleiades, for St. Hubert's Day is the 3rd of 
November, the day succeeding the three days' festival 
beginning the November year of the Pleiades. The origin 
of all these stories of the deer- sun -god Cernunnos is 
clearly traced to a Northern source, whence they travelled 
southward to Asia Minor, by the story of Thoas, which 
shows how this originally Northern tale was thus dove- 
tailed into the Southern story of the birth of the sun-god 
from the mother-tree. The name of Thoas, called the 
king of the Tauric Chersonnesus, has been shown by Dr. 
Sayce to be a form of the Arabic Ta'uz, which is a cor- 
ruption of the Hebrew Tammuz, the Akkadian Dumu-zi I , 
the star Orion. He, in whose country strangers were 
sacrificed on the altars of Artemis, lay twelve nights with 
his daughter, Myrrha Myrina, or Smyrna, without know- 
ing who she was. When he recognised her he pursued 
her, who was in the Indian story RohinI, the star Alde- 
baran, Queen of the Pleiades, with his sword or club of 
Orion, with which he hunts the stars round the Pole ; and 
she to escape him changes herself into a cypress - tree, 

Sayce, Hibberl Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 235, note 3, p. 239, note 1. 



94 History and Chronology 

whence in ten lunar months the young sun-god Adonis 
was born. This story, which traces Orion to the Tauric 
Chersonnesus, where human sacrifices were offered to Ar- 
temis, furnishes further proof of the Northern origin of 
the Orion cult, and marks Asia Minor as the country 
where the Northern hunters were united with the Southern 
sons of the tree, who shed no blood in their sacrifices. 

When we turn from the national mythology of North- 
west Europe to the geological history of the Hautes 
Fagnes, we find further proof of the correctness of these 
deductions. It is clear that the progress to Asia Minor 
and the amalgamation in that country of the alien tribes, 
who united to form the population of the European villages 
founded in the beginning of the Neolithic age, must have 
occupied a long portion of the latter part of the Palaeo- 
lithic age of Northern Europe. I have already shown 
that there are strong reasons for believing that the deer- 
sun myth originated in the worship of the reindeer by 
the dwellers in the caves of the Ardennes country and 
Northern France, who had domesticated it during the 
Glacial epoch ; and hence it is in the geological history 
of this country, whence the emigrants to Asia Minor set 
forth, that we must search for information elucidating 
the history of the movement. 

The geological survey of the alluvial quaternary deposits 
of Belgium, lately completed under the superintendance 
of M. Rutot, gives us what appears to be a most satisfactory 
explanation of the causes which led to the establishment 
of the most revered shrine of the deer-sun-god in the 
barren and arid region forming the summit of the Ardennes 
country. M. Rutot tells us how, during the epoch he calls 
Hesbeyenne, the third of those into which he divides the 
quaternary age, there occurred a period characterised by an 
extraordinary downfall of rain caused by the rapid melting 
of the sinking glaciers formed in the Glacial epoch, when 
the land was elevated. This universal thaw was the result 
of the subsidence of the country, which sunk from 450 to 



of the Myth- Making Age. 95 

600 feet, so that large tracts of land which were high 
above the sea during the Glacial period of terrestrial ele^ 
vation, sank below the sea level. These were therefore 
overwhelmed by the sea, which completely covered the 
valleys of the Meuse, Sambre, Scheldt, and their tributaries, 
and the only dry land left in Southern Belgium was the 
high country of the Hautes Fagnes *. These inundations 
drove into this elevated and previously ice-bound tract 
the whole human population which had covered the country 
during the previous Moseene and Campinian epochs, when 
the Spy Onoz men, their predecessors, and those who joined 
their confederacy, made their flint implements of the Mes- 
vinien and Mousterien types. Thus this high country 
became the head-quarters of national activity, and the 
home of those who were saved from the flood. It seems 
very probable that it was this wide - spread catastrophe 
which originated the numerous stories of a universal deluge, 
and the consequent escape to the mountains of the saved 
remnant of humanity, current in Babylonia, India, China, 
Greece and other lands whither the descendants of the 
Ardennes, sons of the sun-deer, had emigrated. 

It was these people who originated the story of the year- 
arrow which slew the sun-deer, and of the resurrection 
of the slain god as the sun-god of a new year. And this 
story, in its progress Southward, appears in another variant 
form told in Rigveda iv. 27, and in the Brahmanas. The 
archer in this version is Krishanu, the rainbow-god, the 
drawer {karsh) of the bow, a reminiscence of the flood age, 
but his mark is not the year-deer but the Shyena bird, 
the bird of frost (shyd), the sun-bird of the winter solstice. 
He shot her as she was flying through the sky carrying 
the sacred Soma, the sap of life, that is as the rain-cloud, 
and one of her feathers and her blood fell to the earth 
and grew up into the Palasha-tree {Butea frondosa), the 
sacred tree of the Mundas, and the first tree which was 

1 A. Rutot, Les Origines du Quaternaire de la Belgique, pp. 121— 124. 



96 History and Chronology 

worshipped as that which, supplied in its sap, partaken as 
a sacramental drink called Soma or the life-sap of Su, 
the bird (the root of the word Soma), the germ of an 
ever-reviving life r . This tree, which began its growth at 
the winter solstice, flowers in Central India at the time 
of the summer solstice, and as it grows there as a gigantic 
creeper spreading from tree to tree over the area where 
it implants itself, it covers large areas of the forest with 
glowing sheets of brilliant crimson flowers. 

In order to see the full historical meaning of this story 
we must compare it with another variant form told in 
the ritual of the festival of the Rudra Triambika, or that 
of Rudra with the three wives, of which Ambika was the 
chief. This is a very ancient festival held at the winter 
solstice 2 , and the offerings presented at it are made, as 
the Brahmanas tell us, to Rudra's arrow 3, that is, to the 
arrow of Rudra, the thunder-god form of the Pole Star 
god, with which he first shot at the god of the winter 
solstice, the year-deer. This deer becomes in this festival 
the year Shyena or frost (s/iya) bird, the bearer of the 
circumpolar supply of the moisture of life, the rain, which 
was to nourish and keep alive the living things on the 
earth during the coming year. The bird in this form of 
the story is called Ambika, the chief of the three queens 
of heaven, ruling the three seasons of the year. This 
name shows that this group of the three wives of the 
rain-giving god have the same names as the three daugh- 
ters of the king of Kashi, who was, as we have seen in 
the Sama Jataka, one of the shooters of the year-arrow 
and the king of the Kushite capital. These three, Amba, 
Ambika and Ambalika, were won by Bhishma, who, as 
we shall see hereafter, was a sexless sun-god of the age 



1 Eggeling, Sat.Brak., i. 7, 1, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 1S3, note 2, iv. 6, 1, 3, 
xxvi. p. 422, where the Palasha is called the Shyena-hrita tree. 

2 Max Miiller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. i. p. 228, where 
he quotes Prof. Oldenberg's description of the feast. 

Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, 2, 3 — 17 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 438 — 442. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 97 

of the Kauravyas and Pandavas, from the assembled princes 
of India to be the wives of his nephew Vi-chitra Virya, 
the two (vi) coloured {chitrd) embodiment of male strength 
(Vir). Amba, the eldest of the three, is a star in the 
Pleiades. She was allowed to decline the royal marriage 
because of her previous engagement to the king of the 
magicians, the king of Saubha. She is thus marked as the 
star-mother-goddess of the primitive age of the Pleiades. 
Hence it is antecedently probable that her two sisters, who 
became the mothers of the royal races of the Kauravyas 
and Pandavas, from whom all subsequent Indian kings 
claimed descent, were also stars marking epochs of time. 

This probability becomes all but a certainty when we 
examine the story of the birth of their children, and find 
that the father who begot them after the death of his child- 
less half-brother Vi chitra Virya was Vyasa, the constellation 
Draco ; and also that, as I shall further prove in Chapter VI., 
the daughter-in-law of Ambika, called Gan-dharl, who 
married her blind son Dhritarashtra, was the Pole Star 
Vega in the constellation of the Vulture from 10,000 to 
8000 B.C. That is to say, she was the Pole Star of an epoch 
of religious belief which made the vulture-bird-star the mid- 
queen of a heaven supported by the blind gnomon-stone, 
marking the daily and yearly motions of the sun called 
Dhrita-rashtra, or the upholder (dhrita) of the kingdom 
(rashtra). This Pole Star queen of heaven, the waterer 
[dJiari) of the land (gan or ganh), was the successor of Tara, 
the Pole Star who wedded Su-griva, the bird-headed ape, 
in the age of the Pleiades year, and hence Ambika who 
intervened between the two as the queen of heaven was also 
a Pole Star. Thus she was the Pole Star in the constella- 
tion Cygnus, called originally the Bird, that is to say, she 
was the Shyena bird-bearer of the circumpolar rain-store 
shot by Krishanu and Rudra, the successor of Tara, the Pole 
Star in Kepheus from 21,000 to 19,000 B.C. Ambika, as the 
Pole Star in Cygnus, was the Pole Star from 17,000 to 
15,000 B.C. 

H 



98 History and Chronology 

The third wife of Rudra was Ambalika, the mother of the 
impotent Pandu, who became sexless when he slew a Rishi 
who had assumed the form of a deer I . This Rishi slain 
as the year-deer was, in the variant form of the story Marlchi, 
the fire-spark, whence the Kushika race was born, slain as 
a deer by Rama, and at once transported to heaven as a 
star in constellation of the Great Bear or the seven ante- 
lopes (Ris/iya), which was, as we have seen in Akkadian 
astronomy, the cradle of the year-god. His mother was the 
bear-mother constellation, of which I shall tell the history 
presently, when I show its connection with this year of 
Orion. 

The Rudra Tri ambika festival of the death and re-birth 
of the year-god of the year of three seasons was held at the 
meeting of four cross-roads to the North of the sacrificial 
ground. There was a mound in the centre of the meeting- 
place to represent the mother-mountain of the Turano-Finn 
race of magicians. The offerings were cakes made of rice 
ground on millstones placed on the skin of a black antelope, 
Mriga, meaning that which goes round (meregh), and applied 
to the animal which goes round the year-circle as the sun- 
bird or as the sun-deer. The black antelope was the 
descendant of the sun-deer. The two rice cakes offered 
to represent the two original seasons of the year were, accor- 
ding to the instructions given in the Satapatha Brahmana, 
thrown into the air, caught again, and hung at the end 
of a beam, after they had been offered to Rudra's arrow 
on a Palasha leaf (Butea frondosd). This ceremonial proves 
that the story of Rudra's arrow is a variant form of that 
of Krishanu, which brought the sacred Palasha tree to life. 
The priests in this sacrifice make two circular circumambu- 
lations of the altar. They first go three times round it 
contrary to the course of the summer sun, the direction 
represented by the female Suastika i-l, which depicts the 
sun's path when it begins its yearly journey by going North 

1 Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, xcv., cxviii. pp. 286, 343 — 345. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 99 

at the winter solstice. In this circuit the priests are followed 
by the village maidens, the matriarchal village mothers. 

In the second circuit, which is made sun-wards to mark 
the path of the sun of the male Suastika LC, going South- 
ward at the summer solstice, only the male sacrificer and the 
priests officiate. 

Further proof of the correctness of the historical deduc- 
tion, proving that Ambika and the Shyena or frost [shy a) 
bird slain by Krishanu and Rudra was the Pole Star in 
Cygnus, is given in the ritual of the Ashva medha or 
sacrifice (medha) of the sun-horse {ashva), which was the 
New Year's sacrifice of the year succeeding those measured 
by the stars and moon. In this sacrifice, Amba, Ambika 
and Ambalika are invoked as the three heavenly mothers, 
who are to lead to heaven the horse slaughtered as the sun- 
god of the dead year. Ambika, called the Mahishi or chief 
queen, addresses her two sister stars, telling them that she 
" renounces the right to be the bride of the sun-horse, and 
resigns that honour to Su-bhadr I ." Su-bhadra, as we 
shall see, is the mountain-goddess Durga, the twin sister 
of Krishna, the black sun-antelope, whose year preceded that 
of the sun-horse. 

In this long analysis of the year stories of the sun-deer 
and the year Pole Star bird, I have shown that the ruler 
of the year designated in them was the archer-god of 
heaven, called Krishanu or Rudra. He appears again in this 
character as Su-dharvan, the father of the three Vedic 
Ribhus 2 , the fillers of the three cups denoting the seasons, 
for Su-dharvan means the bow (dharvan) of Su (khu), that 
is the bow of the year-bird. They are the gods called 
by the Babylonians Ribu, the great divine Akkadian princes, 
An-nun-gal 3. They form the Polar year-circle guarded 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brak., xiii. 2, 8, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. p. 321 ; Tait. Samh., 
vii. 4, 19, 1 ; Zimmer, Altindisches Leben, chap. i. pp. 36, 37 ; Hewitt, Ruling 
Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. , Essay iv. , pp. 336, 337, note 1. 

2 R g- ^ 35. I- 

3 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 141, note I. 

II 2 

LofC. 



ioo History and Chronology 

by the constellation Draco the alligator, the Akkadian 
Istar in her form of Rahabu, who was the Hebrew and 
Phoenician Rahab worshipped at Carthage and all the 
ancient Semite shrines as one of the chief ruling gods 1 . 
This alligator-god is the god Maga or Muggar, worshipped 
everywhere in Bengal and Northern India ; the god called 
in the Gond Song of Lingal, Puse or Mug-ral the alligator, 
who first saved the Gonds born from the caves at the sources 
of the Jumna from the flood which threatened to overwhelm 
them till they were taken by Lingal on board his ship, that 
of Dame the tortoise, the confederacy of the Kushite sons 
of the tortoise ikitsh) 2 . He was the crocodile-god of Egypt, 
called Maga-Sebek, Maga the uniter {sbk) i a form of the 
year-god Osiris, who as Sahu was the star Orion, and as 
Sebek-Ra the sun-god 3. 

This uniting-god of the Northern and Southern races is the 
Vyasa of the Mahabharata, meaning the uniter, and called 
the priest "with the grim visage and the strong odour." 
He was the son of SatyavatI, the fish- mother of the Matsya 
or royal fish {matsya) born race, and Parashara, the over- 
hanging {para) cloud {shara) begotten in a mist, who became, 
as we have seen, the father of the children of his half-brother 
Vi-chitra Virya, the king of two united races 4. He is the 
god called in one hymn in the Rigveda the father of IndraS, 
and in another the Vritra, the circling-snake Vyansa with 
the two {vi) shoulders {an sa), whom Indra slew, and who 
becomes in another stanza of the same hymn the god Danu, 
the Pole Star father of the Danava 6 . 

The three Ribhus, the three seasons or forms of the encir- 
cling year-god^ are called in Rigveda iv. 33, 4,5,9, the makers of 



1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 258, note 1, Gesenius, 
Thesaurus Rahab. 
- Hewitt, Riding Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 223, 224. 

3 H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien JEgyfter, pp. 105, 587. 

4 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cv., cvi., pp. 317 — 323. 

5 Rg. iv. 18, 1, 9, 10, Ludwig's translation, Hymn 959, vol. ii. p. 590. 
c Rg. i. 32, 5, 9. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 101 

the year-cow and her calf, and are named, (i) Vaja, the active 
or cunning god, the workman of the Vaishvadeva or national 
village (visk) gods ; (2) Vibhvan, the distinguished god, the 
workman of Varuna ; and (3) Ribhu-ksha, the master (ksha) x , 
Ribhu, the workman of Indra. This apportionment of their 
duties marks them as the three gods of the Chatur Masya 
year of three seasons of four (chatur) months each. These 
are dedicated in the Brahmana ritual to the (1) Vaishvadeva, 
the gods of the spring season ; (2) Varuna, father of the 
eaters (ghas) of barley, Varuna's corn, the god of the summer 
called Varuna praghasah, dedicated to the barley-eaters ; 
and to (3) Indra, god of the rainy and winter season of the 
Saka-medhah 2 or sacrifices to the Saka or wet-god, wor- 
shipped as Sek Nag by the Gonds 3, whom we have seen 
(pp. 50, 69) to have been the original ruling-god of India, the 
Arabian Sakhr, and the Akkadian Sakh or Sukh, mother 
of Suk-us the sun-god. This year, according to the ritual 
of the years measured by months as inculcated in the 
Brahmanas, began with the full moon of Phalguna (February 
— March), but as the year of the Ribhus, as it is called in the 
Rigveda, is that measured by seasons, it began at the 
winter solstice, for it was at the end of this year that 
the Ribhus slept for twelve days in the house of Agohya, 
the Pole Star, meaning " that which cannot be concealed 4." 
This twelve days sleep conclusively marks this year as 
that of three seasons which I am now describing, which 
closed with the twelve days revel before the winter solstice 
ending with the death of the deer-sun-god, the twelve nights 

1 The word ksha, meaning "master," is derived by Grassmann from kshi, 
to rule. This is a Bactrian word whence is derived the Bactrian khsaya, 
powerful. The root appears in the language of the Zirian Finns as khsi, 
a lady, the Osetan akshi, and in the Scythian royal titles of Leipo-xais and 
Arpo-xais preserved by Herodotus. It appears in India in the name of ksha- 
trya or warrior (ksha) tribe, who are thus shown to be of Finn-Bactrian descent. 
Abercromby, Proto and Prehistoric Finns, vol. i., Iranian Period, p. 233. 

a Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 5, I, ii. 5, 4; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 383 — 420. 

3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 229. 

4 Rg- iv. 33; 7- 



102 History and Chronology 

during which Thoas slept with his daughter the Pole Star, 
mother of the sun-god born of the world's tree. There is 
a still further instance of this twelve days sleep to be added 
to the list, the twelve days and nights during which Ar-chal, 
the Phcenician sun-god, slept on the funeral pyre before 
he was recalled to life as the sun -god of the new year on the 
2nd of Peritius, the 25th of December. It was the quails 
who woke him from the sleep of death, and it was in com- 
memoration of this resurrection that quails were offered 
to the Greek Herakles I . These quails, called in the Rigveda 
Vartika, the turners (vart) of the year, are sacred to the 
Ashvins or twin-gods of night and day, who release them 
from captivity and from the rage of the devouring wolf of 
time 2 ; that is to say, restore them to life to be the heralds 
of the new year when they arrive in Northern India, as they 
usually do about the winter solstice. This story of the 
quails and the end of the year of Orion is repeated again 
in the Greek myth, which tells how Orion the hunter was 
placed among the stars after he had been slain on Ortygia, 
the island of the quails (6pTV<ye<; Foprvyes), by Artemis, the 
goddess of the constellation of the Great Bear. The twelve 
days' sleep of Archal is also recorded in the Akkadian epic 
of Gilgames, which tells how Iabani, the comrade of 
Gilgames, was wounded by Istar, and how he died after 
lingering for twelve days, and how Gilgames implored the 
gods of the lower world to restore him to life. He rose again 
as the sun of the new year in the twelfth book of the poem 3, 
to be the antelope or gazelle sun-god 4, the Assyrian form 
of the Hindu black antelope-god Krishanu. This year of 
three seasons of Orion, the deer-hunting sun and star-god, 
and of the three Ribhus, is one of twelve months of twenty- 
nine days each, the Zend year and that of the Hindu 

1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. x. p. 386 ; Athenaus, ix. 45. 

2 Rg. i. 112, 8, 116, 14, 117, 16, x. 39, 13. 

3 Frazer, ' The Saturnalia and Kindred Festivals,' Fortnightly Review, Nov., 
1900, p. 832. 

4 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 282—284. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 1 03 

Karanas, as explained on p. 41 ; that in which each month 
was divided into six weeks of five days or nights. But this 
reckoning only gave 348 days to the year, and the twelve 
more days required to complete the sun-circle of 360 days 
were these twelve days, which I have now shown to have 
been added to this year in Scandinavia, Germany, Asia 
Minor, Greece, Syria, and India. 

The myths which I have quoted to illustrate the his- 
tory of this year, show that it dates from a very remote 
period of human history ; but remote as this period was, 
apparently about 17,000 B.C., when the Pole Star was in 
Cygnus, it was, as we see from the year - measurements, 
subsequent to the division of the sun-circle into 360 degrees. 
This is a division which arose naturally out of the measure- 
ments of the year by 72 weeks of 5 days each, a division 
which, as I have shown, originated among the Dravidians. 
The duodecimal scale on which it is based is essentially 
of Dravidian origin, for it arose out of the custom of counting 
everything by Gundas or fours, a custom which is almost 
instinctively used by all Indians even down to the lowest 
coolie. This division of the year's time accompanies that 
of the day into thirty muhurtas of forty-eight and sixty 
ghatis or hours of twenty-four minutes each, which is uni- 
versally used throughout India. It dates back to the 
earliest period when the fractional parts of. the year of 
360 days began to be reckoned by the astronomical priests, 
for it appears in the instructions for building the brick altars 
of the sun-bird, the altar of the Agni-chayana ceremony 
used in the final form of Vedic ritual, instituted at the 
very beginning of the age of the rule of the Sanskrit 
speaking sun-worshippers. In the rules for building this 
altar, given in the SatapatJia Brahmana, 10,800 bricks, 
called Lokam prini or bricks filling the world {loka), are 
ordered to be used in building the Garhapatya and Aha- 
vaniya altars, and the eight Dhishnya hearths in the con- 
secrated sacrificial ground ; and this number, equal to 360 
X 30, is said to represent the number of Muhurtas, thirty 



104 History and Chronology 

to each day in the year, of the sacrificial altar x . This 
division of the fractions of time, as Alberuni shows in his 
exhaustive treatise on the Hindu system of measuring time 
for astronomical purposes, underlies the whole system of 
Hindu chronology, and must undoubtedly be very much 
older than the oldest of the Vedic poems. In the Bud- 
dhist Nidanakatha its origin is referred back to the days 
of Kashyapa, son of Marlchi, the deer-star, in the constella- 
tion of the Great Bear, who made the Banyan tree (Ficus 
Indica) his parent-tree ; and this I have shown, in p. 26, 
to be the national tree of Kuru-kshetra, and of the very 
ancient race of the Kauravyas. The Nidanakatha says that 
the archangel Ghati-kara, the maker of Ghatis, who gave the 
Buddha the eight requisites of a mendicant saint, was the 
attendant angel of Kashyapa 2 . Among these was his 
earthenware begging bowl, the symbol of the seed-bearing 
earth-born tree-trunk of the early mythology. This dis- 
appeared while he was waiting for his initiation as the sun- 
god under the Nigrodha or Banyan tree, sacred to his 
forerunner Kashyapa, and it was not till after his last and 
final consecration as the sun-god, marching on his yearly 
path through the stars, that he received the eight bowls, four 
made of sapphire and four of jet, those of the round of 
day and night brought by the four Lokapalas or angel- 
regents of the four quarters of the heavens. These were 
made into one bowl, the vault of heaven, consecrated to the 
sun-god. 

D. The sun-circle of three hundred and sixty degrees. 

This measurement of the sun-circle of 360 degrees dates 
back also in Europe to a period of very remote antiquity, 
for it is undoubtedly that used by the builders of the 
very ancient stone circles at Solwaster in Belgium, about 
seven miles from Spa. There are a number of stone circles 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., x. 4, 3, 20; S.B.E., vol. xliii. p. 360. 
2 Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories; The Nidanakatha, pp. 51, 85, 86, 93, no. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 105 

on this very high table-land, which completely dominates 
the surrounding country, and these have all been examined 
and surveyed with scientific instruments by M. Harroy, the 
Principal of the Government Normal School at Verviers. 
They are all sun-circles, and in the centre of each is the 
Hir-men-sol, or great stone of the sun. At a distance of 
thirty metres from this stone is an astronomically arranged 
circle of stones of 360 degrees ; a stone being placed to 
mark each ten degrees of the circle, as tested by M. 
Harroy's measurement. Thus there were originally thirty- 
six stones in each circle, but none of them are now quite 
complete. Also the stones indicating the rising points of 
the equinoctial and solstitial suns are larger than the others. 
Thus the North-east and South-west arcs of these circles 
form, as M. Harroy says, a great stone sextant. 

Apart from these circles is the dolmen, or sacrificial 
stone altar, raised on four supporting stones, on which 
animal victims were offered. It was also used elsewhere 
as a burial-place, but not at Solwaster. Its longer axis 
points due North and South, and it is marked with the 
image of the ancient plough common on the dolmens of 
Britanny I . 

Besides these Solwaster circles of 36 stones, there is 
also the remarkable [inner circle of 36 syenite stones at 
Stonehenge. This is placed inside the great circle of thirty 
sarsen stones denoting the thirty days of the month, and 
it is probably these later builders who have added the four 
sarsen local stones to the circle of thirty-six syenite stones 
brought from Dartmoor 2 . These Stonehenge stones are not 
like those of Solwaster, so placed as to mark the degree 
points of the circle, and it is probable that they represent 
the original thirty-six BrihatI weeks of the sun's half-yearly 
course. 

1 M. Harroy, Cromlechs et Dolmens de Belgique Le Dolmen et Cromlechs de 
Solwaster, pp. 8 — 35. 

2 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 
138—140. 



io6 History and Chronology 

There is also a noteworthy assemblage of thirty-six stones 
at Kursunno in Britanny near a dolmen, which has been 
used as a burying-place. These stones are not arranged 
in a circle but placed round the sides of a square. There 
are ten stones on each side, and thus the two sides unit- 
ing the two opposite sides of ten stones only contain eight 
stones each, so that the whole number of stones is 10 X 10 
x 8 x 8 = 36. There was no monolith in the centre, and 
the square field formed by these stones was apparently a 
reproduction of the primitive augur field of Roman ritual. 
The stone circles, with the Hir-men-sols in the centre, 
within which no living victims were offered, were clearly 
erected for the adoration of the rising sun of day, and not 
of the setting sun of night of the Southern races. But these 
circles were certainly much later in date than the solitary 
Hir-men-sols or Menhirs, such as that at Tournai in Bel- 
gium, and the gigantic stone menhir at St. Renan in 
Britanny, which abound everywhere in Europe where 
megalithic stones are found. These show that the original 
cult of the sun in the stone age in North Europe was an 
indigenous worship introduced into southern countries by 
the worshippers of the deer-sun. It was these worshippers 
of the sun - gnomon -stone who introduced the custom of 
setting it up in villages as the village god. This be- 
came the Perron or sign of municipal liberty still found 
in so many German and Flemish towns and depicted on 
their arms. That these were sun-stones is clear from the 
Pyr of Augsburg, which is a fir-cone, still borne on the 
arms of the town, but on a Roman monument called the 
altar of the " duumviri," now in the town museum, it is 
placed on the top of a pillar. This pine-cone, like that 
on the top of the " Thyrsus " of Bacchus, consecrated the 
pillar to the sun. This rude stone menhir, which was the 
image of the sun-god in the early age of Orion's year, 
was " the holy white stone of the sun," by which it is said 
in the Saga of Gudrun that all Scandinavians swore *. 

1 Goblet d'Alviella, The Migration of Symbols,^. 103 — no; Godrunar Saga. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 107 

E. The southward emigration of the Neolithic builders of 
stone monuments, and of the men of the Paleolithic age, 
and the history of Pottery. 
These menhirs became the Beth-els of the Jews and the 
Betuli of the Arabians, and they and the dolmens and sun- 
circles, which were not generally sun sextants as at Solwaster, 
mark the track southward of the men of the Neolithic age. 
They in every country through which they passed in Europe, 
Asia Minor, Syria, and the land of the stone cities of Bashan 
and India, have left these megalithic monuments as evi- 
dence of their rule of these lands, where they pitched 
their camps. In Moab these monuments seem to be ar- 
ranged in districts, as, according to Dr. Tristram, the 
stone circles of Callirrhoe are not associated with dolmens 
as they are to the North and in Ataroth, consecrated to 
Atar, the god of fire ; there are dolmens without circles I . 

The whole system, when thoroughly examined over tracts 
where these megalithic monuments abound, shows a con- 
tinually changing theology of sun-worship, varying, as will 
be seen in the sequel, with the measurements of annual time. 
This culminates in the two columns at the entrance of all 
Phoenician temples, and the sacred obelisks of Egypt and 
Arabia dedicated to the Vulture Pole Star goddess Vega, 
the Egyptian Ma'at, the Arabian El Nasr, the vulture, the 
Pole Star from 10,000 to 8000 B.C. These builders of 
megalithic monuments were among the earliest emigrants 
from Europe and Asia Minor to India, and they are repre- 
sented now by the most primitive of the caste-races, whose 
marriage ceremony is completed by the bridegroom's marking 

! the forehead and parting of the bride's hair with red sindur. 
This symbolises, as is proved by the actual interfusion of 

! blood enjoined in some caste rituals, the formation of blood 

j Strophe 47. The ancient pillars of cut stone set up in the centre of the village 
I as successors to the primaeval menhirs still exist in the villages of Garsington 
j and Cuddesdon near Oxford. In the latter place the original pillar has become 
; the shaft of a cross. 

1 Tristram, Land of Moab, chap. xiv. p. 269, xvi. p. 300 ff. 



io8 History and Chronology 

brotherhood between the alien races of the bridegroom and 
bride, and as almost all these marriages are accompanied 
by a simulated capture of the bride, the ceremony proves 
that this almost universal form of marriage was introduced 
by a conquering race. 

The tribe to which the origin of these customs is assigned 
is that called in the Gond traditions of the Song of 
Lingal the Kolamis who captured their brides, and these 
formed one of the four divisions of the Gond race called in 
the poem the primitive Gonds. These divisions are, (i) The 
Korkus or Mundas; (2) The Bhils or men of the bow (billam 
whose immigration I have already accounted for ; (3) The 
Kototyul or sons of a log of wood, the aboriginal Dravidians ; 
and (4) The Kolamis, 

These last are the people who introduced into India the 
family organisation of exogamous marriages, instead of that 
of the matriarchal village, and of the inter-tribal community 
of women common among the non-marrying Northern races. 
These marrying conquerors are represented in Bengal and 
Central India by the Males and Mai Paharias of the hills 
of South Behar and the Kharias and Kharwars of Chutia 
Nagpur, who ultimately became the Chiroos or sons of the 
bird (C/iir), who are one of the three Dasyu or country 
(desk) born races descended from Agastya, the star Canopus. 
These people all worship the god Gumi Gosain, the god 
of the wooden pillar (gimio), which supports the house-roof, 
and against which the family hearth is placed. This pillar 
is called in the theology of the Mahabharata the blind 
king Dhritarashtra, he who upholds (dhrita) the kingdom 
(rdshtra). Round the central pillar are placed balls of hardened 
clay, representing the ancestors of the family, and on these 
the firstfruits of the earth are offered, and the blood of fowls 
and goats poured over them. This ritual shows that they 
introduced the goat as a sacrificial animal in addition to 
the fowls of the Mundas. They are all sun-worshippers, and 
a pole consecrated to the sun as the god Dharma Gosain, 
" the prophet of law," is set up in front of each house, but 



of the Myth- Making Age. 109 

hi 

ijj they also imitate the Mundas in worshipping the god of the 
J Sal tree in the village grove. These Males, Mai Paharias 
I and Kharias are still in the stone age, for they manufacture 
y no metal x . 

The first Indian immigrants of these races began by 

M worshipping the Menhir or sun-gnomon-stone, still erected 

i by the Kossias and by the Mundas, which latter use it as 

ijj a memorial of their dead. This became, after their union 

I with the sons of the tree, the wooden pillars of the Males 

pj worshipped by the Jews as the Asherah, and the gnomon- 

| stones and wooden tree pillars of the northern Eberones, 

p| or sons of the boar [eber), the name assumed by the earliest 

[I confederacy who ruled in the Ardennes. These latter people 

|j were believers in magic, who claimed the bear as their 

mother totem, and worshipped the stars of the Great Bear, 

the mother-stars of the sons of the third Hindu queen of 

heaven Ambalika ; and they were the Pandya or fair 

(pandu) race, who formed the third of the three Dasyu 

descendants of Agastya, the Kolas or Cholas, Chiroos and 

Pandyas. 

These sons of the bear seem to belong to a distinctly 
Northern race, whose original home was in North Europe. 
In the Magic Songs of the Finns the birth of the bear is 
traced to the sky-maiden who walked along the navel of 
heaven, the centre Polar circle, with a wool box in her hand, 
whence she threw five tufts of spinning-wool on the waves 
of the sea. These were picked up by the forest-mother 
Mielikki, who placed the wool in her bosom, whence the 
bear was born, and she rocked the babe in a cradle of the 
mother-pine-tree 2 . In other words, the bear-mother was 
the daughter of the spinning Pleiades who went round the 
Pole Star navel of the sky in the year of five-day weeks, and 



1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii., Males, p. 57 ff., Mai Paharias, 
pp. 69—71, vol. i. Kharias, pp. 468 — 471. 

2 Abercromby, Magic Songs of the Finns, iii., The Origin of the Bear, 
Folklore, 1890, pp. 26, 27. 



HO History and Chronology 

of the mother-fir-tree. She was Besla, the bear-mother 
of Odin, who was also the son of Bor the tree x . 

But we have in geology and comparative ethnology a still 
more certain guide than that given by tradition to the great 
antiquity of the bear race sons of Artemis, called Arktos 
the Great Bear. These people who were traditionally ruled 
by Thoas or Dumu-zi, the star Orion, king of the Tauric 
Chersonnesus and Asia Minor, can be traced back to the 
race which has furnished the earliest human skulls and 
skeletons yet found in the North, a race far older than that 
of the Furfooz men of the Hesbeyenne deluge, who wor- 
shipped, as we have seen, the reindeer. They are called 
by Quatrefages, the men of Cannstadt, whose skulls are 
of the type called Neanderthal. The oldest skeletons of 
this group, those of the Spy Onoz man and woman, are far 
older than those of the other dominant race of the Palaeolithic 
age, the Cro-Magnon or archer- men, whom I have already 
described. These were found eight metres outside the cave 
of Spy Onoz on the Ormian, a tributary of the Sambre 
to the North-west of Namur. They lay at a depth of about 
four metres from the surface in the lowest of four successive 
undisturbed layers of (i) brown, (2) yellow, (3) red, and 
(4) yellow clay, the last of which was stained with burnt 
charcoal 2 . The skulls were ten and nine millimetres, or 
nearly half-an-inch thick, long and narrow, with a very 
receding forehead, so that the cranial vault was very low. 
The cranial capacity of the male skull was 70, and that 
of the female 75, about that of the modern Australians, 
Hottentots, and Peruvian Indians. One of the most remark- 
able features in these skulls is the great pent-house formed 
above the eyes by the eye-brow ridges, like that found 
among the Ainos in Japan, and the Todas in South India, 
both of which races have abnormally hairy bodies. The 

1 Prose Edda, chap. vi. ; Mallet, Northern Antiquities, p. 403. 

2 Proces Verbal, signed hy MM. I. Braconnier, De Puydt, Fraipont,and Leliest, 
attached to a report of the investigations made at Spy by MM. De Puydt and 
Lehest, the latter of whom is Geological Professor at the University of Liege. 



of the Myth- Making Age . m 

eye-orbits are round and very large, and the nasal bones 
prominent with large nasal orifices. The jaws are large, 
heavy and prognathous in their upper part, and the teeth 
very large, the last molars being of equal size with the rest, 
and thus differing from those of modern human jaws. The 
face was almost without chin, and the skulls much resembled 

'l those of one of the Australian tribes near Victoria r . 

Though this form of skull and face is like that of a gorilla, 

I yet the kephalic index is not less than that of the Indian 

J Brahmins, Dravidians and Persians, stated by M. Pruner 
Bey to be 72 ; and this peculiarly shaped skull is, as M. 
de Quatrefages shows, consistent with the possessor of great 
ability, for it is reproduced not only in those of two gentle- 

(i men of great intellectual attainments, whose names he gives, 
but also in that of Robert Bruce, the Scottish king, who 
had, as he says, a perfect Neanderthal skull 2 . 

According to M. Fraipont, Professor of Palaeontology 
at Liege, the Spy Onoz skeletons prove that the race to which 
they belonged was short and squat, that they usually walked 
in a bowed position with bent knees, and their tibia were 
of the platy-knemic type, found also among the Ainos. 

But however unprepossessing in their appearance this 
low - browed, dwarfish race may have been, the contents 
of the cavern in which they lived and stored their goods, 
and of the deposits found above and round their bones, con- 
clusively prove that they were a really active and powerful 
breed of men, who more than maintained their own in their 
life contest with the animal monarchs of the forest, who 
possessed inventive ability, and had organised a system of 
tribal government which marked them as people who lived 
in permanent settlements and not as mere wandering no- 
mads. For they made expeditions to distant lands, whence 
they brought back property, which they stored in their cave 
homes. Their flint implements, weapons, and ornaments 

1 Topinard, Anthropology, p. 504; De Quatrefages, The Human Species, 
chap. xxvi. g. 307. 

2 De Quatrefages, The Human Species, chap. xxvi. pp. 309, 310. 



112 History and Chronology 

give proof of their advance in invention, and of their wide- 
spread trade connection. The first are of the Mousterien 
type used by the earliest men of the Cro-Magnon race, 
and are not like those of the earlier Mesvinien and Acheu- 
lean epoch made of local flint, but of flint from Champagne 
in France, the nearest source whence this special kind of 
flint could be procured. The obsidian, chalcedony and 
opal found among these remains must have come from 
the volcanic formations in the eastern Eiffel and the Black 
Forest country. These importations tell us of a trade with 
these lands, and of a manufactory of flint implements in 
Champagne, where more care was bestowed on the manu- 
facture of weapons such as the arrows of the Cro-Magnon 
men, and the spear-points of the Neanderthal hunters, than 
on the ruder Mesvinien flints. The excellence reached by 
these manufacturers shows a great advance in culture, for 
the form, weight, and angle of the Cro-Magnon arrows were 
varied for use at different distances of flight, and for the 
pursuit of various kinds of game x . Also the importation 
of stones from the Eiffel and Black Forest shows the 
existence of a mining industry in their localities, and similar 
evidence of widely distributed commercial intercourse is 
given by the pierced shells of Pilonculos Pilosus, found in 
the layer above the Spy Onoz bodies, which must, according 
to M. Rutot, have been imported from the shell marls in 
Touraine. Also the ivory arrow and dart-points found in 
the cave deposits show that these Neanderthal folk were 
able to make implements of their own, and that they were 
acquainted with the use of the bow, though they do not seem, 
like the Cro-Magnon men, to have used arrows for killing 
large game. 

The animal deposits found in the layer containing the 
skeletons, and those immediately above, show the very great 
antiquity of this race. There were bones of the woolly 
rhinocerus tichorinus, the horse, ox (Bos primigenius) , Mam- 

1 De Quatrefages, The Human Species, chap, xxvii. , The Cro-Magnon Race, 
pp. 316, 317. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 113 

moth, and cave hyaena. Those of the pig, dog, bear, cave- 
lion and stag were less common, and there were very few 
bones of the reindeer. The time when these deposits 
were formed was therefore that before the first glacial 
epoch, when the animals dwelling in the forests and prairies 
of the country watered by the Sambre and Meuse were the 
woolly-rhinoceros, mammoth, primaeval ox and horse, which 
could better stand the cold, indicated by the presence of the 
reindeer, than the hippopotamus and big-nosed rhinoceros, 
who had dwelt there in the warmer epoch which was fast 
departing. The age was that following the time when the 
cave bears were more numerous than the cave hyaenas, 
and preceded that when the reindeer and bison had sup- 
planted the animals of the warm temperate climate of 
the early Quaternary period. That these Neanderthal people 
hunted the mammoth and reindeer is proved by the seven 
mammoth tusks found in the corner of the cave, and the 
heap of reindeer horns in another. These were manifestly 
used for making ornaments, weapons, such as the ivory 
arrow-heads, dart-points, and necklaces, also found with 
domestic utensils made of the same materials. 

But the crowning proof of the inventive ability of these 
men of the Spy Onoz and Neanderthal group is given by 
their invention of pottery. For it was they who must 
have made the four pieces of pottery found in the red layer 
above the Spy Onoz specimens. This was, according to the 
proces verbal, drawn up by M. Fraipont, M. de Puydt, 
and the members of the excavating committee, quite un- 
disturbed, and the pottery found in it must have been buried 
at the same time as the bones of the early Quaternary 
animals which were in the same layer. That pottery was 
invented by the Neanderthal race, probably at the time when 
the advance of the glacial epoch was changing the climate, 
seems to me to be also clearly proved from an examina- 
tion of the evidence given by its existing use in other parts 
of the globe. Before the Southern Hemisphere was dis- 
covered by Europeans, pottery was entirely unknown to 

I 



H4 History and Chronology 

all Australian and Polynesian nations, except the Fijians, 
the Tongas of the Friendly Isles, and the people of Easter 
Island, where there are the only written inscriptions found 
in any island of the Pacific I . The Fijians and their con- 
querors in the Friendly Isles derived their village institu- 
tions, as I have shown in Chapter I., from the Indian 
Naga races, formed by a union of the matriarchal people 
of the South with the patriarchal totem races of the North. 
In Fiji and Tonga all pottery is made by hand by the 
women, while the present Indian Kumhars, who make the 
Naga pottery, divide the work by making the necks of 
the jars on the potter's wheel of northern invention, while 
the rounded parts are made by the women ; and these Kum- 
hars claim to have been specially created by Shiva, the 
shepherd god of the bow Pinaka, at his marriage 2 with 
Uma {flax), the mother of the weavers, and they were thus 
one of the earliest northern immigrants into India. 

In Africa the Hottentots had no pottery before they 
met with Europeans, and cooked their victuals in leathern 
jars filled with water heated by hot stones 3. Similarly 
neither the Esquimaux nor the aboriginal tribes of Siberia 
know how to make pottery ; the former use vessels with 
clay sides and stone bottoms, and those of Siberia leathern 
or wooden vessels, like the Siberian wallet, made of birch- 
bark, or wooden vessels lined with stone 4. Pottery was also 
unknown to the Cro-Magnon men who lived in the caves 
of Dordogne, and it is only in three palaeolithic caves of 
the reindeer epoch on the Liesse that any pottery of that 
age is found in Belgium, except that found at Spy Onoz. 
These caves are the Trou des Nutons, or the Hole of 
the Dwarfs, the Trou de Chaleux, and the burial cave 
Trou de Frontal. There are only broken fragments of 

1 Ratsel, History of Mankind, translated by A. J. Butler, vol. i. pp. 78, 79. 

2 Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, Second Edition, p. 445 ; Risley, Tribes and 
Castes of Bengal, Kumhars, vol. i. pp. 518, 524. 

3 Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, Second Edition, p. 420. 

4 Ibid., pp. 482, 483 ; De Quatrefages, The Human Species, p. 319. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 1 1 5 

pottery found in the first two caves, but in the Trou de 
Frontal there was a complete jar similar in shape to those 
found in neolithic graves. The skeletons buried in the 
Trou de Frontal are of a mesato-kephalic race, occupying 
a middle position between the brachy-kephalic dwarf Finn 
race who introduced magic and the doliko-kephalic race 
of Spy Onoz. It is in its flattened receding forehead and 
large superciliary ridges nearly allied to the Neanderthal 
race I , and as neither they nor the men of the Trou de 
Chaleux or Nutons used the bow, they did not derive 
their civilisation from the Cro-Magnon men of the South. 

It is almost impossible that pottery could ever have been 
invented for common use in a southern forest country, where 
hollow bamboos and gourds were always available as water- 
vessels ; and for their cooking the Southerners probably, long 
before they boiled their rice, used the hot stones on which 
the Kurumbas of Madras used formerly to parch it 2 , and 
thus make the dry rice still sold in Indian bazaars. 

The art of making pottery must have originated in an 
inland country with a clay soil, and one where the winter 
climate was so cold as to make a fire almost necessary 
for the preservation of life. Its inventors must have been 
tribes who did not live near the sea, and who could not 
therefore turn themselves, like the Esquimaux, into walking 
ovens by eating enormous quantities of whale and seal 
blubber. As the inland Neanderthal race could not warm 
themselves with this heating diet, and as the Belgian climate 
in the beginning of the elevation of the first glacial epoch 
made artificial heat necessary for those who had hitherto 
lived in the genial Pleiocene warmth, it is clear that their 
minds must have dwelt upon the consideration of methods 
for combating the effects of the increasing cold. Hence 
we see how an inventive genius among these dwellers in the 
river forests of Belgium, who found the clay of the soil was 

1 De Quatrefages, The Human Species, Races of Furfooz, chap, xxviii. 
P- 338. 

2 Elie Reclus, Les Primitifs, p. 224. 

I 2 



n6 History and Chronology 

hardened by the fires lit on it, first hit on the germs of the 
idea of making clay fire-proof vessels. He first made platters, 
like those of which the Spy Onoz specimens are fragments, 
and then proceeded to make the jars of which the broken 
bits are found in the Belgian palaeolithic caves of the rein- 
deer age. 

I have not been able to find any evidence showing how 
the Belgian pottery was disseminated in Europe during the 
Palaeolithic age, but it must have been brought southward 
by the Neanderthal people in their wanderings, and also 
by their allied neighbours of Furfooz, who emigrated to Asia 
Minor in the reindeer age, and established there the worship 
of the deer-sun-god, and of the pine-mother of the bear 
race, the cave-mother Cybele. It was in these emigrations 
through countries peopled with alien races that the pure 
Spy Onoz group became absorbed in those it encountered 
in its travels. Thus mixed races were formed, partaking 
of the racial peculiarities of the Spy Onoz, Furfooz and 
Cro-Magnon stocks. It is on the North-eastern coasts of 
Asia that we find in the hairy Ainos of Saghalin, the most 
northern island of Japan, a people who apparently reproduce 
in their osteology the original Spy Onoz type but slightly 
changed by foreign inter-mixture. Their skulls show that 
they were descended from doliko-kephalic and brachy- 
kephalic ancestors, but their receding foreheads and pro- 
minent ridges over their eyes show that the Neanderthal 
race was one of the stocks from which they were descended. 
Their hairy bodies and platy-knemic tibias also point to the 
same conclusion. They were like all the primitive northern 
races, eaters of flesh, and were once cannibals, and then 
apparently they were fierce and warlike conquerors, and not 
peaceable like their present representatives. Topinard, who 
connects them with the European races, tells us that 
according to their native traditions they came from the 
West, accompanied by the dog, the animal sacred to the Bhil 
bowmen, and which was one of those found at Spy Onoz, 



of the Myth- Making Age. lij 

where it was probably the only domestic animal kept by the 
tribe ". 

The Ainos of the present day do not make pottery, but 
it is found in the old hut dwellings of the people called 
by the Ainos Koro-pok-guru, the dwarf dwellers under- 
ground, whom they say they conquered, and who are 
apparently of the same race as the dwarf men of the Liesse, 
and the ancient pigmy races of Scotland, who lived in the 
underground Picts' houses. Pottery is also found in the 
shell heaps along the coast 2 . 

The Ainos are a patriarchal people who acknowledge 
paternal descent and supremacy, for a man brings his wife 
to his father's house; and they also show signs of*. affinity 
with the forest races of Africa, for they make cloth from the 
fibrous bark of the mountain-elm (Ulmus montand)^. 

Their belief in their bear descent is one of the most 
remarkable of their national characteristics. The bear is 
their parent-god, sacrificed and eaten raw by the Ainos, and 
roasted by the Gilyaks every year at their national year- 
feast in the autumn 4. The young bear who is to be eaten 
at each yearly sacrifice is caught as a cub and suckled 
by the wife of the captor. When the day of its decease 
comes offerings are made to it, and the women of the tribe 
dance before it. Its skull is worshipped after death. They 
shoot the bear with poisoned arrows, like those used by the 
dwarf races of Central Africa, and they hang up the quiver, 
which is looked on as holy, on the hedge surrounding the 
sacrificial ground. They thus show their affinity to the 
sons of the bow and the tree, and these ethnological rela- 
tionships are also asserted in the following national birth 
story. A young Aino, pursuing a bear, followed it into 

1 Topinard, Anthropology, pp. 350, 431, 445, 476, 505; Hitchcock, 'The 
Ainos of Yezo,' Report of the National Smithsonian Museum, 1890, p. 456. 

2 Ibid., pp. 419, 421, 422, 435. 

3 Ibid., pp. 465, 451. 

* The feast described by Mr. Hitchcock took place on the 10th of August 
in 1880. 



n8 History and Chronology 

a cave, where he found himself in another world. He ate 
the fruit he found there while pursuing the bear, and was 
changed into a snake. He crawled back to the mouth 
of the cavern, where he fell asleep at the foot of a great 
pine-tree. The goddess of the pine-tree, a variant of Cybele, 
woke him and told him to climb up the tree and throw 
himself down from it. On doing this he found himself in 
his human shape, standing by the body of a serpent ripped 
open. Here we find evidence of descent both from the 
mother-tree and the circling snake, and these Indian 
characteristics are also repeated in the Aino worship of 
the fox, the foxes driven by Indra and the constellation 
of the fox, our Lepus, at the feet of Orion J . 

Though these Ainos show Indian and African affinities, 
yet they seem to be ethnologically most nearly allied to the 
dwarf wizard races of the North, and more especially to 
the primitive men of Spy Onoz, a race with hunting and 
warlike proclivities, who called themselves the sons of the 
bear, and looked to the constellation of the Great Bear 
as their patron stars. A similar annual bear festival to that 
observed by the Ainos used to take place in Norway 2 , and 
it is apparently to North Europe that we must look for the 
original deification of the Bear in the bear-goddess Artemis, 
worshipped in Athens as the mother of all young girls, who 
were called her bears, and of the human sacrifices offered 
at her festivals, which were reminiscences of former cannibal 
feasts. 

The early arrival in India of the bear-descended race is 
shown by the part they take in the story of Rama and Sita. 
Rama is, as we shall see, the ploughing ox, the god of the 
Kushikas, and his wife was Sita the furrow. He was the 
son of Raghu, the Northern sun-god Rai or Ra, and the ex- 
pedition made by Rama to the South to recover Sita, who 



1 R. Hitchcock, 'The Ainos of Yezo,' Report of the National Smithsonian 
Museum, pp. 476, 473, 480, 485, 472. 

2 Lydekker, Royal Natural History, vol. ii. p. 23. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 119 

was carried off by the ten-headed Ravana, is a re- 
miniscence of the stories I have quoted in Chapter II., 
which tell how the summer sun is seized and imprisoned 
by the winter god of darkness dwelling in the South. 
Rama's chief assistants in his quest were the ape-kings> 
the bird-headed ape Sugriva, and Hanuman, whom I 
have identified with the constellations Kepheus and Argo ; 
but to these is added in the account of the muster 
of the host Jamvavan, king of the bears, with a hundred 
thousand bear warriors, who all have the Tiloka or 
bear mark of descent on their foreheads I . This king of 
the bear race is the constellation of the Great Bear, in which 
their race parents, Marlchi the fire-spark, and Kashyapa the 
father tortoise (kus/i), are chief stars. His name Jamvavan 
means the Jambu tree (van) (Eugenia jamboland) , the sacred 
fruit-tree of the sun-god in the forests of Central India. 
This was the tree under which the Buddha, the infant 
sun-god, was seated on his first appearance in public at the 
ploughing match of the furrow (Sitd), which began the year 
of the ploughing Kushikas. While the Buddha was seated 
under this tree its shadow never moved 2 . 

This bear race in their progress southward through 
Eastern Asia seems to have been merged in the great 
confederacy of the Miao Ts'u tribes of Central China, who 
traced their descent to the mother Sha-yh, the grain of 
river sand, who was made pregnant by a floating log, the 
mother-tree, which became a dragon, the constellation Draco, 
the Northern constellation which ruled time during the 
age of Orion's year, before it was succeeded by the bear 
constellation of the Ainos. Topinard connects the Miao 
Ts'u, the Ainos and the Lolos with the Samoyeds, who are 
not hairy like the Ainos ; and their connection with the Lolos 
points to a union in Eastern China of the Northern Wizard 
races, the worshippers of fire, with the Indian matriarchal 

' Mahabharata Vana {Draupadi-harana) Parva, cclxxxii. p. 836. 
2 Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories : The Niddnakathd, p. 75. 



120 History and Chronology 

Dravidians. Hence arose the Amazonian Lolo custom of 
the rule of women, and the government by queens. It 
was from them that the Lolos of Thibet are descended r . 

The route by which the hairy bear race reached India 
seems to have passed not through China but Asia Minor, 
and thence down the Euphrates. They seem to be the 
dwarf race called in Manx the Fenodyree, meaning those 
who have hair for hose, the Satyrs described in Isaiah 
xxxiv. 14, as "the satyr who shall cry to his fellow," where 
satyr is translated in the Vulgate pilosus, the hairy one ; 
the attendants in Asia Minor on the goat-god Pan, who 
is, as I shall show in Chapter IV., p. 141, the Pole Star god ; 
the people represented by the goblin Loblic by the Fire 
who, as described by Milton, basks at the fire his hairy 
strength 2 . They are the hairy race with aquiline noses de- 
picted on the oldest seal-cylinders of Girsu, the race connected 
by Topinard with the Ainos, Tasmanians and the Todas of 
the Indian Nilgiris 3. They were the followers of the parent 
god Gud-ia, the bull (gud), la, who called Gutium the land 
of the bull. It was they and their earlier congeners the 
menhir builders, who built the megalithic stone monuments 
covering the lands in which they dwelt during their journey 
Southwards. They had united themselves in Asia Minor 
with the Indian Dravidians, and had there formed the 
confederacy of the sons of the sun-deer and the moon-bull, 
the male moon of Northern mythology. In India they 
became the Gautama, or sons of the bull-father, called in 
the Mahabharata Chandra-Kushika, the moon of the 
Kushikas4. They were the earliest representatives of the 



1 Terrien de la Couperie, The Languages of China before the Chinese, chap, 
xii. sects. 97 — 100; xviii. sects. 152— -154, pp. 56, 57, 88, 89; Topinard, 
Anthropology, pp. 475, 476; Terrien de la Couperie, 'Thibet,' Encyc. Brit., 
vol. xxiii. p. 344. 

2 Rhys, Celtic Folklore, chap. iv. vol. i. p. 288. 

s Topinard, Anthropology, The Pilous System, p. 35© ; F. Hommel, All- 
gemeine Geschichte, Babyloniens und Assyriens, p. 292. 

4 Mahabharata Sabha {Rajasuya-rambha) Parva, xvii. p. 55. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 12 1 

Brahmins who divide their caste into septs called Gotras 
or cow-stalls. 

The primitive form of this ancient priesthood is to be 
found among the Todas of the Nilgiris. They are a tall 
form of the dwarf mesato-kephalic race of Furfooz, whom 
they resemble in their receding foreheads, protuberant eye- 
brows, and hairy bodies, traits derived from the Spy 
Onoz race, but their noses are not concave, like those of 
the Furfooz men, but aquiline I , like the Cro-Magnon and 
Assyrian noses. It is from these latter that they seem to 
have acquired their height and martial appearance. They 
take in India the place occupied in the ethnography 
of Asia Minor by the primitive Jewish warlike herdsmen 
of Ararat and the uplands of Cappadocia. They had 
features like those of the Todas, and were born from a cross 
with the hairy Satyr races with round heads, the ancestors 
of the worshippers of the goat-god Pan in Asia Minor, 
Arcadia 2 and Italy, who was also the parent-god of the 
Indian Males of the Kushika race, and of the Fauns of Italian 
mythology, the sons of the sun-deer. He was a god of the 
caves which were his temples, and he is a male form of 
Cybele, to whom oak trees were sacred. 

It is in the ritual of the Todas that we find the clearest 
proofs of their descent from the pastoral tribes of Asia 
Minor, the Getae, called by Herod, i. 216, the Massa Getae 
or Greater Getae, who lived on the banks of the Araxes or 
Kur. Their principal food, like that of the Todas, was milk, 
and they are called by Ammianus the holiest of men. These 
Todas worship the sun and the Pole Star ruling and lighting 
their northern maternal country Am -nor, the mother (am) 
land. They live in round houses like those built by the 
Phrygians of Asia Minor, and the Finn races who trace their 
descent to the bear, and who also adore the household fire. 
They are proved to be a Northern race by their endogamous 

1 Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer of India, Nilgiri Hills, vol. x. p. 309 ; Elie 
Reclus, Les Primitifs, p. 212. 

2 Frazer, Pausanias, viii. 54, 5 ; vol. i. pp. 443, 444 ; ii. 360 ff. 



122 History and Chronology 

marriage customs which are quite opposed to Southern 
exogamy, and also by their custom of polyandry, in which 
one wife is married to a community of brothers, a custom 
originating in the old Finnish national law, which made the 
wife the priestess of the household fire. These Todas were 
the priests of the latest immigration of the Northern pastoral 
races, the men who buried their dead in the monumental 
earth burial - mounds of the Scandinavian type which 
cover the Toda country, and adored the trident of Shiva, 
the shepherd-god., still worshipped by the Badagas, the 
agricultural section of the Toda tribes x . 

The Toda chief is the high-priest called the Palal or great 
milkman, an officer answering to that of the Patesi or priest- 
kings of the Gaurians of Girsu. He is elected to the office, 
and after his election he is consecrated at the end of a long 
period of fasting and meditation. He lives alone in the 
forest for a week on the banks of the national parent-stream, 
and for the first three days and two nights he is perfectly 
naked and has no fire. On the third night he may light 
a fire by the sacred process of twirling a wooden fire-drill 
in a wooden socket. Each evening his Vicar, the Kavi-lal, 
brings him a bowl of milk, his only nourishment. He cuts 
with a sacred flint-knife the branches of the national parent- 
tree, the nut-tree called Tude [Milling tonia Symplicifolia) 2 , 
strips off the bark, and after bathing in the sacred stream, rubs 
his body three times a day, morning, noon and evening, with 
the holy sap, which he also mixes with water and drinks. At 
the end of the consecration his birth as a reborn divine being 
is completed, and he becomes the child of the sap of the nut- 
tree, born from the seed vivified by the rain, the germ of life, 
which made it grow and filled its veins, the almond-tree of 
the Jews. This child of the nut-tree and the heaven-sent 
rain, the blood of God, has been nurtured in holiness by the 
milk of the divine mother-cow. This is the fast milk (yrata), 
the only food allowed during its continuance to the par- 

1 Elie Reclus, Les Primitifs, p. 275. 

2 Clarke, Roxburgh's Flora Indica, p. 35. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 123 

> 
takers of the Soma sacrament 1 . In this latter, the sacra- 
mental cup in the later Vedic ritual is not, as among the 
Todas, the nut-sap and running water, but the sap of barley, 
the seed of life, of the later ploughing races, mixed with 
river water, curds and milk, the Vedic ingredients of the 
latest form of Soma, called the Tri-ashira or three mixings 2 . 

The baptism and consecration of the Palal, answering to 
the baptism of the Soma communicant, follows this week of 
fasting. The girdle and head-dress of each new Palal is 
made of the remnants of his predecessor's robe of office. He 
is bathed and rubbed with the sap of seven different sacred 
trees, and swallows some drops of each kind of sap. After 
his consecration he enters on his duties as guardian of the 
national herd of sacred cows, whom he alone can milk 
morning and evening. He also bears, as the national god, 
the divine sceptre, the Jewish almond-rod of Aaron, the 
rod of the parent-tree which leads the sacred kine out to 
their daily pasture 3. 

The sacred cattle of the sun-god recall the 350 sun-oxen 
of the ploughing Sikels of the Odyssey, xii. 129, the dwellers 
in Trinacria of the three (tri) headlands, the Triangular 
island of the god of the year of three seasons. Also the 
cows of light, which Sarama, the constellation Argo, was to 
deliver from their nocturnal captors 4. The great antiquity 
of this consecration ritual is marked by the flint - knife 
used by the Palal. 

The sacred wand or sceptre of the divine leader of the sun- 
cattle was the original Baresma or rain (dares) wand, cut from 
the parent sun-tree, the pomegranate, date or tamarind 5, 
which succeeded the nut-tree, as it followed the pine-tree of 



1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 1,2, i ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 6. 

2 Rg. v. 27, 5 ; viii. 2, 7 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., 
Essay iii., p. 242. 

3 Elie Reclus, Les Primiti/s, Monticoles des Nilgheris, pp. 260—262. 

4 Rg. x. 108, 

5 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendidad Fargard, xix. 19; S.B. E. vol. iv. 
pp. 209 — 22, note 1. 



124 History and Chronology of the Myth-Making Age. 

the North. This, as we have seen (pp. 7, 8), became the Hindu 
Prastara, first of Kusha (Poa cynosuroides), and afterwards 
of Ashva-vala or horse-tail grass (saccharum spontaneum). 
The Zend high-priest, bearer of this sacred wand of office, 
was like the Toda Palal, "the guardian of the sacred kine," 
and it is to Ahura Mazda, the breath {asu or ahu) of know- 
ledge, called " the creator of the kine," that the earliest 
Gathas of the Zendavesta, the holy hymns and prayers of 
Zarathustra, the first high-priest, are addressed. They were 
the religious hymns of the sons of the land of Gutium con- 
secrated to the bull-father of the people, who were originally 
the Scandinavian Goths, the sons of Got, our God. The Zend 
country was the land of Assyria and Northern Persia, where 
the aborigines are now the shepherd Ilyats. Their father- 
god became Iru, the bull-god of the Zends, who called the 
Great Bear their parent constellation the Hapto-iringas or 
seven-bulls, a name translated by the Romans into the 
Septem-triones or seven oxen who draw Charles's Wain. 
This name was given to the constellation which was first 
that of the hairy sons of the bear, when these Northern 
hunters were united with the farmers of the South and 
the pastoral races of the North-west, the pastoral shep- 
herd subjects of the priest-kings, " the guardians of the kine," 
called, in reminiscence of their descent from the cavern- 
haunting bears, the mountain their mother - goddess, and 
named her Ida, Ila, or Ira. She was the Phrygian mother 
Ida, the sheep-mother, a name surviving in the Tamil Eda, 
a sheep, and in the 350 sun-sheep, which in the Odyssey pas- 
tured with the sun-oxen and the sheep fed by Polyphemus, 
the Cyclops, the one-eyed Pole Star god. It was to this 
race born of the mother Ida, enthroned in the Pole Star, 
resting on the central earth mountain, that the ancestors 
of the Todas and the Indian Gautama belonged ; and 
they, as priest-kings, ruled the Kurumbas or united shep- 
herds and farmers, whose chief clan is that of the culti- 
vating Kurmis. 



CHAPTER IV. 



The year of three seasons of six-day weeks ruled 
by the eel-god, the parent-fish of the sons 
of the rivers. 

I HAVE now in this historical inquiry reached a stage 
whence I must begin to trace the racial progress of the 
amalgamated tribes of farmers, hunters and shepherds, which 
were congregated together in Asia Minor at the close of the 
Palaeolithic Age. These people had, as we have seen, two 
original lines of ancestry, marking their southern and 
northern descent. As the sons of the South, they were the 
sons of the cloud-bird Khu and the mother-tree, and as 
the sons of the North, the children of the deer-sun-god and 
of the mother-mountain, fertilised by the rain-mist en- 
shrouding its top, and descending to its base in the parent- 
rivers which water the earth with the seed of life. 

A. The sons of the rivers. 

The central mother-river of these mixed northern and 
southern races was the holy Euphrates, called in Genesis 
xi. 22, the river of Nahor, the Nahr or channel of the land, 
called Naharaina by the Egyptians in the inscriptions 
telling of the conquests of Thothmes III. This mother- 
river-goddess, who became afterwards the male father-god 
Nahor of the patriarchal Hebrews, was the Greek Anaitis, 
the Zend Ardvi Sura Anahita, the pure; holy, undefiled 
mother of life rising from the home and nest of the bird, 
the Zend Hu-kairya, the creating {kairya) Hu-bird *, another 

1 Hu is the Zend form of Khu, the bird ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Aban 
Yasht, Introduction; S.B.E. , vol. xxiii. p. 52. 



126 History and Chronology 

name of Ahura Mazda. These sons of the mountain and 
the bird belonged to a different stock from that of the 
woodland sons of the sun-deer, but as dwellers in the North 
they worshipped the sun as the giver of light and heat, 
and looked upon the sun-god as the measurer of their year. 
But his annual course was not told to them in the shedding 
and re-growth of the reindeer horns, but in the migrations 
of the eel, which leaves the mother-rivers in autumn and 
returns in spring. Their southern ancestral history had 
told them of the fish-mother of life dwelling in the abyss 
of the Southern Ocean, and this prophetic mother became 
to the Finn race, who inherited her teaching, the eel-goddess 
Il-ja, the Icelandic all, the German aal, who became the 
Sanskrit Ahi, the Greek Echis. This eel-parent-god has 
become in the later Finn patriarchal theology, the air-god 
Il-ma, which became Il-mar, meaning who {mar) is II, 
a name like that of Kutsa the where (hi), given to the 
prophet-god of the Indian Nahusha, called Varshagiras 
the praisers (giras) of rain. The name Il-mar is that of the 
weather-god 1 , who became Il-marinen, the god of the Great 
Bear, the second god of the Finn triad of Vainamoinen, the 
rain-god, Il-marinen, and Ukko the Pole Star bird, who, as 
Taivahan napanen, the navel of heaven, dwells in Tahtela 
the home of the Pole Star, the Hindu Ushana, who causes 
rain to fall on the earth ~. It is this eel-smith who is the 
eternal forger, the arranger of the creating weather. It was 
as his messengers that the prophet-eels left and returned 
to the mountain-rivers. 

It was apparently these Finns who introduced the god- 
name II or El, which is used as the sign of the divinity 
in all Semitic countries. This was the god Eliun, called by 
Josephus, Antiq. xi. 8, the Supreme god of the Phoenicians and 
Samaritans, the god still worshipped in Syria as El Khudr, 

1 Comparetti, The Traditional Poetry of the Finns, 'The Heroic Myth,' 
pp. 238 — 240. 

2 Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, Ixxviii. p. 243 ; Hewitt, Riding 
Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii. , p. 155. 



of the Myth- Making Age.. 127 

the divine (el) water (kkudr, Gr. vhwp), also called the 
prophet (hasriti) Elias. His temples are scattered every- 
where along the Syrian coast, and Dean Stanley describes 
one which he visited, which was devoid of images, and was 
only marked as a temple by the curtain drawn across the 
recess sacred to the Unseen God *. His festival is cele- 
brated throughout Syria on St. George's Day, the 23rd 
of April, and Lydda, the centre of his worship, is called 
in the episcopal lists, dyto yeopylov 7ro\is, the city of the 
Holy George, whose temple is called the house of Khudr 2 . 

Thus the eel-god is the ploughing-god, the worker 
(ovpyos) of the earth (yrf), the rain-god who marks his 
furrows in the earth by the trail of the tiny rain-streams 
he ploughs on the surface, which grow into the river-parents 
of life. He is thus the god of the channel (nahr), the Gond 
Nagur, the plough-god and the god of the plough constella- 
tion of the Great Bear. 

This eel-ploughing prophet-god became in India the Vedic 
Indra, whose name is derived from the root Indu. This 
root appears as Aind or Indu, the eel totem of the Kharias, 
a semi-aboriginal tribe of Chutia Nagpur, who also have 
the sheep for their totem, as they may not eat mutton or 
even use a woollen rug. They are almost in the stone age, 
as they live in huts made of Sal branches stuck in the 
ground, and though they are able to mend their iron- 
pointed digging sticks (kuntis) at forges worked with most 
primitive bellows, they never manufacture but always buy 
iron. They worship Dorho Dubo, known to the Ooraons, 
Santals, Kharwars, and other tribes higher in the social scale, 
as Dharti, the god of springs, as well as Giring Dubo, the 
sun, and Gumi, the pole (gumo) god, who is the chief deity 
in their Sarnas or sacred groves 3. 

1 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, p. 274. 

2 Garnett and Stuart Glennie, The Women of Turkey and their Folklore, chap, 
iv. p. 125; chap. v. Note on St. George, p. 192. 

3 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Kharias, vol. i., pp. 468 — 471 ; vol. 
ii. , App. i. , Kharia totems. 



128 History and Chronology 

These Kharias are the parent-tribe of the Kharwars who 
once ruled Chutia Nagpur, and it is to this tribe that the 
Raja of Ramghur in Hazaribugh belongs. He holds his 
estate of Ramghur as a fief vested in the holder of his 
hereditary office of Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the 
Chutia Nagpur Raja. The Kharwars include the eel-god 
Aind among their totems, as do the Mundas, the land-holding 
Rautias, a branch of the Kaurs or Kauravyas, the Asuras 
workers in metal, the cow-keeping Gualas, the Pans weavers 
and basket-makers, and the Santals. The eel, under the 
form Amduar, is a totem of the mountain Korwas, the 
parent-tribe of the Mundas, and of the Behar Gualas, and 
the Goraits or boundary guardians. These also use the 
alternative form Induar, which is also that used by the 
Nageshars, or worshippers of the Naga snake, the Turis 
or basket-makers, the Chiks a branch of the Pans, the 
Lohars or smiths, and the Ooraons l . In short almost all 
the primitive manufacturing, mining and pastoral tribes are 
sons of the eel. This parent-eel was worshipped, as we 
are told in Herod, ii. 72, by the Egyptians, and it is in 
India the totem-god of almost all the tribes who practise the 
magic and witchcraft learnt from their Finn ancestors. The 
sacrifice of the Copaic eelj crowned with garlands and 
sprinkled with meal, was an annual sacrifice of the Boeotians 2 , 
descended from the first agricultural immigrants who, under 
Kadmus, the man of the East (kedem), entered Europe from 
Asia Minor at the beginning of the Neolithic Age. 

When we turn from tribal totem genealogy and ritual 
to the evidence given in folk-stories of the belief in the 
ancestral eel-god, we find that in two Italian stories quoted 
by Count Angelo de Gubernatis the eel appears as the 
parent of the year of Orion, of the gods of time, Night and 
Day, and of the reed-thicket whence the Kushika race was 
born. In the first, a fisherman caught an eel with two heads 

1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii. , Appendix, List of tribal totems. 

2 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 132. Agatharchides referred to by Athenseus, 
vii. p. 297. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 129 

and two tails, the two seasons of the year. The eel directed 
the fisherman to plant the tails in his garden, to give his 
entrails to his bitch and the two heads to his wife to eat. 
Two swords, the sword of Orion, were born from the two 
tails ; two dogs, Sirius and Procyon, from the entrails ; and 
two sons, Night and Day, from the two heads. 

In the second story a maiden in a tree, the tree-mother, 
was entreated to come down from it by a servant of the 
priest, who was washing in a spring at its foot, the spring 
at the root of the ash-tree Yggdrasil. When she came 
down she was thrown by the priest's washerwoman into 
the spring, where she was devoured by the parent-eel. It 
was caught by a fisherman, who was slain by the witch 
washerwoman as he was taking it to the king. She threw 
the eel into a bed of reeds, and it became a reed, which 
was opened when it was taken to the king, and from it 
the sun-mother-daughter of the tree was born. In a 
third story the year-maiden pursued by a witch becomes, 
in her last changes, a water-spring and an eel x . 

Thus we see that the eel was the prophet and parent-fish 
of the sons of the mother-mountain, who traced their descent 
to the springs welling from its sides, which ultimately be- 
came the parent-rivers of the Iberian Basques of Asia 
Minor. The name Iberian is derived from the Basque 
Ibai-erri, the people (errz) of the rivers (zdaz), who first 
brought wheat and barley into Europe and India. They 
replaced the matriarchal system of village unions by in- 
dividual marriages, and with marriage they brought in 
the custom of the Couvade, which we are told by Apollonius 
Rhodius, ii. 1010, was indigenous among the Tibareni, the 
people of the Basque country of Iberia. The new system 
of patriarchal descent, which was to replace that from the 
mother, was introduced by the Basque fathers in the simu- 
lated sickness in which they asserted their rights as parents 
of their wives' new-born child. This custom was taken by 

1 De Gubernatis, Die Thieve, pp. 600—602, German Translation. 

K 



150 History and Chronology 

them to Spain, where it still survives among the Spanish 
Iberian Basques, or men of the forest {baso). They intro- 
duced it into Ulster, where it became known as " cess noinden 
Ulad," the Ulster men's nine days and nights week of 
sickness, and this week, which contained four days and five 
nights, is a reminiscence of the old five-nights week of the 
Indian Danava, the Irish Tuatha De Danann. These latter 
were succeeded in Ireland by the Milesians, who came 
from Spain, and their name, meaning the sons of Mile or 
Bile, is interpreted by Professor Windisch as derived from 
the Irish Bile, a tree growing over a holy well or fort, in 
a word, the mother-tree shadowing the spring whence the 
Ibai-erri, the sons of the rivers, were born 1 as the children 
of Cybele, the cave-mother of Phrygia.. 

The emigration from Asia Minor to India of these patri- 
archal Basque sons of the river, the river- reed, and the 
eel, who were, on one side of their descent, of Indian origin, 
can be traced by several lines of evidence. First, by the 
traditions of the worshippers of the household fire, intro- 
duced by them into India ; secondly, by the Indian sacrifi- 
cial ritual of Orion's and the Ribhus' year of three seasons, 
which became the year of the sun-antelope ; and, thirdly, by 
the history told in the Gond song of Lingal and the Maha- 
bharata of the establishment of the rule of the Kushika 
kings as the supreme rulers of the confederated states of 
India. The history of the worshippers of the household fire, 
always kept alight by the house-mistress, its priestess, which 
became ultimately the perpetual fire maintained throughout 
the year on the centre of the altar of the national and village 
temples, begins with the Greek traditions of the Phlegyes, 
the Greek form of Phrygians, whose name was derived from 
the root Bhur or Phur, meaning fire. They claimed descent 
from the Bru-ges of Thrace, and the original root of their 
name was Bhri, meaning to bear or carry, to bear children. 
Hence they were by race the begetters and the founders 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. p. 603, vi. p. 588, Appendix, 
p. 678. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 131 

of the phallic worship associated with the original worship 
of the household fire in Asia Minor. The aspirate in their 
name became under Finnic influences a tenuis, and thus the 
father-god of the begetting pair of creators became in Finnic 
mythology Piru, who gave eyes to the parent Finn snake T ; 
and the sons of the same father-god of the Phrygians became 
the Turano-Zend tribe of the Fryano sons of the god Phur 
or Phru, who were the intimate allies of the Zend followers 
of Zarathustra's worship of the " Creator of the kine 2 ," who 
are called in the Gathas " Turanians, who shall further on 
the settlements of piety with zeal 3." 

The union of the race of the begetters and of the wor- 
shippers of the household fire is commemorated in the first 
two of the five sacred fires of Zend ritual, the fires of their 
earliest week. These are (1) the fire of Berezi Savangha, 
or of the eastern {Savangha) Berezi, the mother of the race 
born of the Brisaya or sorcerers of the Rigveda 4, the mother 
Maga of the Akkadian and northern dealers in witchcraft, 
and of the fire in stones (p. 42), whence the northern fire 
worshippers kindled their fire before they learnt the 
southern art of making fire from wood.. (2) The fire. 
Vohu Fryano, that of the Vasu or creating sons of Phur, 
the father fire-drill ; and it was as a result of the worship 
of the revolving fire - drill that the mother of fire became 
the wooden socket in which it revolved. 

The name Fryano is the Zend form of the Turanian Viru- 
ano, the sons of the god Viru, the Virata of the Mahabharata 
who ruled the country of the Matsya or fish-born people, 
whose parent-gods were, as we shall see, the mountain 
eel Matsya and his twin-sister Satyavati. They dwelt on 
the Jumna, where Mathura, the rubbing or twirling (manth, 

1 Abercromby, ' Magic Songs of the Finns,' Folklore, vol. i. p. 38. 

2 Mill, Zendavesta, Part iii., The Gathas Yasna, xxxi. 9 ; S.B.E., vol. xxxi. 
p. 44. 

? Ibid., Part iii., The Gathas Gatha Ustavaiti Yasna, xlvi. 12; S.B.E., 
vol. xxxi. p. 141. 
4 Rg- i- 43= 4 ; vi, 61, 3. 

K 2 



132 History and Chronology 

math) city of the national central fire, was their capital. These 
are the same people as the shepherd tribes of Southern 
India, the Kurumbas, sons of the mother (amba) Kur, who 
are followers of the trident-carrying shepherd god, Shiva, 
of the Pinaka or musical bow, who came to India before the 
introduction of pottery into that country, as they, as I have 
shown on p. 115, dried their rice on a heated stone, the 
original Northern fire-mother. Their god, as we learn from 
the Mackenzie Manuscripts, is the Viru-bhadra, the blessed 
Viru, the phallic god, and they generally worship the Sakti, 
or male and female symbols of generation. They call 
themselves Idaiya, or sons Ida or Eda, the sheep, and 
include in their ranks many of the great cultivating caste 
of the Kurmis or Kudumbis T . They are the Virupaksha 
or tribe of Viru worshippers, named in a list of snake races 
in the Chullavagga 2 , who were in the Rigveda destroyed by 
Indra, in his avatar of the bull-god, as the worshippers of the 
Shishna-deva 3, or phallic god, that is of Indra as the eel-god. 

This name Viru becomes in Zend Piru, by the change in 
letters, which makes the Sanskrit Ashva, the horse, Aspa in 
Zend, and this god Piru appears in the Veda as Perum 
apam, the begetter or sweller of the waters, the rain-god who 
gives creative power to the heavenly Soma 4, an image which 
shows that the earliest belief in the rain-god as the father 
of life still maintained its supremacy in India, and did not 
succumb to the materialistic worship of the phallus. 

In the further changes of the name of the fire-father, 
the Finnic Pir became in Akkadian, which replaces a proto- 
Median r by an 1, Pil or Bel 5. Hence the Akkadian fire- 
god is Bil-gi, the spirit (gi) of fire, who became the later Bel, 
and it is due to Ugro-Finn influence that the father-god 

1 Prof. G. Oppert, Original Inhabitants of Bharata varsha, part. ii. pp. 
237—239- 

2 Rhys David's and Oldenberg's Viraya Texts, Chullavagga, v. 6; S.B.E., 
vol. xx. p. 79. 

3 Rg. vii. 21, 5 ; x. 99, 3. 4 ibid. x. 36, 8. 
5 Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic and Sorcery, chap, xxiii. p. 316, 



of the Myth- Making Age. 1 33 

of the Greek worshippers of the household fires became the 
king Phlegyas, who ruled the Cyclopes, or men with one eye, 
the votaries of the Pole Star god. Greek tradition, as 
recorded by Pausanias, speaks of the Phlegyans as a warlike 
race, whose stronghold in Greece was Orchomenos, at the 
head of the Copaic lake where the eel was worshipped, which 
they occupied before the Minyans J . Their king, the Northern 
conqueror, had two children, Koronis and Ixion. Koronis is 
the crow or raven goddess to whom birds were sacrificed and 
whose image was of wood 2 . 

Pausanias, who mentions this image of Kor5nis, does not 
say of what wood it was made, but in one passage where 
he says that all the oldest images of the gods were wooden, 
he names ebony as first in the list of woods used for making 
them, and therefore, perhaps, as the wood of the oldest 
images 3. Elsewhere he says that the old ebony images 
were brought from Egypt, where it was believed to be dug 
up by the ^Ethiopians 4, and that the statue of Artemis, near 
Tegea, which was worshipped as the Lady of the Lake, was 
of ebony 5. The image of Artemis at Ephesus was popularly 
believed to be of ebony, but, according to Pliny, the Consul 
Mucianus, who examined it, found it to be of vine-wood 6 . 

All these facts taken together seem to me to prove almost 
indubitably that the wooden images which were the first 
models of Greek sculpture were originally images of the 
Indian tree-mother Mari-amma, growing in the ocean mud, 
hence she was Artemis, the Lady of the Lake, that is the 
mother-tree sprung from the Southern Ocean lake. This was 
undoubtedly the idea present in the mind of the first sculptors 
of the image of Artemis at Ephesus, a city founded by the 
matriarchal Amazons, and the original image was the tree 
trunk, the form under which Artemis was represented as 
Artemis Orthia, and which, as we have seen (p. 31), was the 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 36, 1 — 3 ; vol. i. pp. 488, 489. 

2 Ibid., ii. 11,7; v °l- i- P- 88- 3 Ibid., viii. 17, 2 ; vol. i. p. 395. 
4 Ibid., i. 42, 6; vol. i. p. 64. s Ibid., viii. 53, 11 ; vol. i. p. 443. 
6 Ibid., vol. iv. p. 246. 



134 History and Chronology 

miraculously found image of Mari-amma as Jagahnath the 
ruler of the world set up in the great temple at Poori. 

Ebony is the Indian wood of the^ Tendoo [Diospyros 
Melanoxulon), growing in all the forests of Southern India, 
and especially plentiful on the Malabar hills, whence it has 
always been one of the chief exports. The ^Ethiopians who 
sent it to Greece were, as I have shown (p. 52), the incense 
collectors of Southern Arabia and India, and it was un- 
doubtedly an Indian sacred tree. From its connection with 
Artemis the Bear goddess and Koronis the raven, whose 
brother was Ixion, the Great Bear or Draco, it seems to 
have been especially sacred to the fire worshippers who 
succeeded the sons of the Sal tree, and I can, from my own 
experience, bring forward one very good reason for the con- 
secration of this tree to the fire-god. While I was Settlement 
Officer in Chuttisgurh I noticed that ebony trees only grew 
on rich soil, and that when trees of other descriptions 
growing on soil suited to the ebony tree were burnt down 
in a forest fire, they were always succeeded after the fire 
by ebony trees, though none had grown there before. 
Hence the wood was especially appropriate as the symbol 
of the mother of fire. 

Further proof that the tree-bear-goddess and her raven 
predecessor Koronis, the bird-mother of life, was originally 
the black-goddess-mother, the raven constellation Argo, is 
given by the black virgin mothers worshipped in Greece. 
The first of these is the black Demeter called Deo, whose 
temple is a cave in Mount Elaios in Arcadia, that is to say 
she is the cave-goddess-mother of the sons of II or El, the 
eel-god of the parent-river. Pausanias tells us that her 
first wooden image was burnt in prehistoric times, but the 
epithet black attached to her and the black tunic in which 
her later image was clothed seem to show that it was 
one imported in matriarchal times, and made of Indian 
ebony. Her name Deo shows her Akkadian origin as the 
goddess of life {zi or di), and I have already (p. 57) shown 
that the ritual of her festival, the Thesmophoria, proves her 



of the Myth-Making Age. 135 

to be the goddess-mother of the original Pleiades year, 
in which the mother - raven constellation Argo led the 
stars round the Pole. This festival, Pausanias tells us, 
was held in the grove of oaks round her cave, and he 
says that the rites were performed by a priestess assisted 
by the youngest of the three sacrificers. Thus this festival, 
in which men and women took part, was a later form of 
the women's festival of the Thesmophoria, and the number 
of sacrificers, three, answering to the three Drupadas or 
sacrificial stakes of the Vedic ritual z , and the three pits 
(gartas) of the Trigartas of the Mahabharata, show that 
it was a .festival of the patriarchal year of three seasons. 
But at this festival of Deo no living victims were offered, 
only the ancient firstfruits of grapes [and other fruits, honey- 
combs and unspun wool on which oil was poured 2 . Pau- 
sanias also mentions a black Aphrodite who had temples near 
Mantinea in Arcadia, at Corinth, and at Thespiae in Bceotia3. 
She was the goddess of Paphos, whose image was a triangular 
black stone, the equivalent of the Phoenician goddess Ba or 
Baau depicted in the Hittite sign Ba ^A as the goddess of the 
double triangle 4. This sign is the Hittite form of the Akka- 
dian sign for woman, ^h and for the same goddess-mother. 

This black mother-goddess, whose Grecian images were 
made of Indian ebony, appears in India as the black virgin- 
mother of Krishna, the god of the black [krishnd) antelope, 
the Indian form of the deer-sun-god of the North, worshipped 
by the Kushite race, and the father-god of all the Indian 
Brahmins descended from the Bhrigus, or sons of fire. They 
all on the day of their initiation wear a black antelope skin, 
the baptismal dress of the partakers of the sacramental 
Soma or tree-sap 5, and tie their girdles of three strands 

1 Rg. i. 24, 13. 

2 Frazer, Pausanias, viii. 5, 5, 42, I — 5 ; vol. i. pp. 379, 428 — 430. 

3 Ibid., viii. 6, 5, ii. 2, 4, ix. 27, 5 ; vol. i. p. 380, 73, 477. 

4 Conder, The Hittites and their Language, app. iv. , Sign 6, p. 237. 

5 Biihler, Manu, ii. 41, 42, Apastamba, i. 1, 3, 5 ; Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 
21, I — 18; S.B.E,, vol. xxv. p. 37, ii. p. 10; xxvi. pp. 25 — 30. 



I36 History and Chronology 

of Munja grass {Saccharum Munjd) round their waists with 
three knots to denote the three stars in Orion's belt i , and 
the three seasons of his year. This three-knotted girdle 
called the Kamberiah is worn by all the sects of the 
Dervishes of South-western Asia 2 , who represent the ancient 
Kouretes and Dactuloi, the dancing priests who succeeded 
the matriarchal women dancers and danced round the Pole 
or gnomon-stone of the year-god of Orion's year to represent 
the stars dancing round the Pole. 

This black mother-goddess, in her form of Koronis, 
daughter of Phlegyas, was the wife of the Akkadian Ischus, 
the Sanskrit Tshu, a beam or pole, the revolving fire-drill 
of heaven, so that she who was originally the ocean-mother 
of rain, the leader of the stars in their daily and yearly 
round, became in the new fire mythology the fire-socket 
in which the ever-turning Pole revolves. Throughout 
Europe she appears as the virgin-mother-fire-tree of night, 
the black ebony-tree, and her temple on Mount Elaios is now 
the shrine of the Black Virgin'3. She is the Black Madonna 
of La Trouche near Grenoble, whose image, originally of 
black wood, is now one of black stone 4, and her festival 
is a May festival held on Whit-Monday. This was the 
festival of the black English goddess Godiva 5, also held 
in May. There is also the stone statue of the mother- 
goddess at Quinapilly near Baud in Britanny, called locally 
the Black Virgin, and the black wooden Madonna of Bally- 
vourney in the County of Cork in Ireland, and that of 
St. Molaise at Innismurray. Also the Egyptian virgin- 
mother, called in the Golden Legend, Maria Egyptica, and 
described as " all black all over her body of the grate heat 
and brennynge of the sun 6 ." This black-goddess, in her 

1 Bal Gangadhur Tilak, Orion, chap. v. pp. 145 — 50. 

2 O'Neill, The Nights of the Gods, Bethels, vol. i. p. 127. 

3 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iv. pp. 406, 407. 

4 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, p. 103. 

5 Hartland, Science of Fairy Tales, p. 85. 

6 Fosbroke, Cyclopmdia of Antiquities, p. 102, quotes Golden Legend, fol 
lxxii. ; Crooke, The Legends of Krishna, Folklore, vol. xi., 1900, pp. 30, 31. 



of the Myth-Making Age. t 37 

double form as Demeter and Persephone, the November 
and May goddess, was originally the mother of the Pleiades 
year. The southward march of these sons of the phallus 
and fire-drill can be clearly traced in the history of the 
Bible, the Zendavesta, and local geography. In the Bible 
they are the sons of Shem, the name of God, the Great 
Potter, at whose command the potter's wheel of the earth 
revolved when driven by the constellation Rahab or Draco, 
and created life by its revolutions. The son of the creating 
name was Arpachsad or Arpa-chasad, the land {arpa) of the 
conquerors ikasidi) I , the potter's wheel of the race. This 
was the country of the mother-mountain Ararat, whence the 
parent-river-channel \{nahor) the Euphrates rose. In this 
land Shelah the spear, the son of the soil, was born as the 
potter-father of the weavers and potters 2 . The Shelah was 
the Celtic Gai, the Latin Gaesum, used in kindling Hre, the 
Gaibolga or weapon of Cuchulainn, the sun-god 3. His 
weaver and potter sons were afterwards called the sons of 
Judah, meaning the praised, who was the Hebrew equivalent 
of the Hindu altar fire first called Nabha-nedishtha, nearest 
to the navel [nabJid), and afterwards Narashamsa, praised 
of men, the Narya Sangha or Yazad of royal lineage of the 
Zendavesta 4. This spear was the sacred spear or fire-drill 
of the army of the conquering sons of fire, borne before them 
on their marches, as the American Indian warrior tribes, 
whose close connection with the Indian Turano Dravidians 
I have shown elsewhere, and will show further in the sequel 
of this work, still carry this holy symbol of the creating-god, 
which rests at night in its sacred tent 5. 

The son of Shelah, the fire-spear, was Eber, the father 



1 Gen. x. 21 — 25 ; Sayce, Bypaths of Bible Knowledge, ii., Fresh Light from 
Ancient Monuments. 

2 1 Chron. iv. 21 — 23. 

3 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. p. 381 ; Lect. v. p. 441. 

4 Rg. x. 64, 3, x. 62 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. , 
Essay iii., pp. 169, 179, 189. 

5 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii. Essay ix., pp. 236 — 239. 



138 History and Chronology 

of the Basque Iberians, and his sons were Peleg and Joktan. 
Joktan's children were the Banu Kahtan (p. 31), the rulers 
of the coasts of the Indian Ocean from Arabia to India, 
and of the Indian gold-bearing lands of Ophir and Havilah. 
Peleg, meaning the stream, the river descending to the ocean, 
was the father of the sons of the rivers and the river-antelope. 
His name occurs in the history of Kadmus as Pelagon, who 
gave Kadmus the cow which guided him to Bceotia, marked 
on its flanks with the full moon. In other words, he was 
the father of the races who measured time by lunar periods, 
called in Greece and Italy the Pelasgi I , descended from 
Pelasgus, king of Arcadia, the grower of acorns, whose 
daughter was Kallisto, the constellation of the Great Bear. 
He was the ancestor of the race represented in the earliest 
pile villages of Umbria on the lake of Fimon near Vicenza, 
containing no cereals but only hazel nuts, water-chestnuts 
and acorns, which they roasted. These people seemingly 
belonged to the short brachy-kephalic and black-haired 
Iberian race of the Ligurians and the Celts of Auvergne 
and Central France 2 . The offspring of the Bear-star-mother, 
the sons of the rivers, traced their descent from the grand- 
son of Peleg Serug, who, as Dr. Sayce has shown, is the 
father-king and god of the Akkado-Babylonians called 
Sar-gani, born of Sar3. His mother was a princess, the 
goddess Shar, the mother of corn, called by the Akkadians 
I-shara, the house (/) of Shara4, the temple of the sun-god 
Adar or Atar, the sun-god of the fire worshippers. She was 
also the Akkadian goddess of grass, Shar 5, that is, of the 
grass whence the sacred barley and wheat was born, and 
as the mother of grass and corn she was the withered husk, 
the rice husk, which I have shown in Chapter II., p. 60, 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 12, 1, viii. 1, 2, 3; vol. i. pp. 459, 373 — 376; 
Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 245 — 248. 

2 Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, pp. 89, III. 

3 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 26, note I, 28, note I, 

4 Ibid., Lect. iii. p. 134, note 1, 166, note 1. 

5 Ibid., Lect. iv. p. 245, note 6. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 1 39 

in the analysis of the story of Demeter and Persephone, 
to be the mother of life in the oldest mythology of the 
South. She was the Sara of Hebrew history, who at ninety 
years old bore Isaac, meaning laughter, the laughing grain, 
which marks the outcome of the year's labours ; and this grain 
of wheat is, according to Professor Douglas, the earliest 
Chinese character for the year r . The sun-god of the Chinese 
year was the sun born from the tree, represented in the 
Chinese character for sun ^j , as the trident of the year of 
three seasons of Orion. 

The mother Shar, the year-goddess of the sons of Eber, 
was the Basque goddess-mother Sare or Zare, meaning 
a basket, and its root is the same as that of Sarika or Sarats, 
meaning osier, which becomes in Latin Salix. It was from 
the osiers growing as reeds round the sources of the mother- 
rivers of the Iberian race in Asia Minor that Sargani, who, 
like Dumu-zi {Orion), knew not his father, was placed in the 
basket of reeds, to which his mother consigned him, in the 
Akkadian hymn telling of his birth. It was down the parent- 
river Euphrates that he went in his reed-boat, the con- 
stellation of the Great Bear, to rule the black-headed race 
of the South, and to till the gardens of Akki the irrigator 3 . 

This osier basket-mother of the young sun-god, the mother 
of the bread of life, became the " mystica vannus Iacchi 3," in 



1 China, by R. K. Douglas, p. 231. 

2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. pp. 26, note i, 27. 

3 This sacred basket containing the soul of the sun-god born from the parent- 
grain, appears in Malay ritual as the basket in which the first seven heads 
cut from the mother-sheaf are placed as the soul of the rice-child. This basket 
contains, before the rice-child is placed in it, a hen's egg, showing that the 
rite is derived from the worship of the sun-hen goddess of the Malays or 
Mundas ; a nut, showing their descent from the parent-nut-tree ; and a cockle- 
shell, showing their maritime origin, also a fire-stone. This basket is carried 
by the chief of the five Penjawats or female {pen) bearers representing the five 
days of the week, and three of the others carry the three baskets, the three 
seasons of the year, which were filled from the first rice cut after that of the 
mother-sheaf. The ears of the rice-soul are mixed with those of the last sheaf 
cut and taken back to the house as the mother-sheaf. It is then threshed out 



140 History and Chronology 

which the firstfruits were carried at the Eleusinian mysteries, 
and her name, Shar or Zare, proves her right to a still more 
ancient origin ; for as the goddess of the husk Sar she was 
the shard, the wing-case or husk of the beetle, the sacred 
Egyptian scarab, who created the earth by rolling it as the 
beetle rolls a pellet of dung. The original form of the word 
shard is to be found in the Low German Skaard, the Ice- 
landic Skard, the High German Scharte, meaning like 
sherd in pot-sherd, a piece of pottery, that is to say, she 
was the mother]- goddess of the potter sons of Shelah, 
descended from the first potters, the Spy Onoz men of the 
first Glacial epoch. This name " sherd " for pottery comes 
from the same root as scaur, the mountain-rock, so the 
mother-star was not only the goddess of the sons of the 
Great Potter, but also of those born from the mountain-rock, 
whence the springs which gave life to the eel-fish-mother 
welled forth. 

It was from this son of Sar, the sun-god born from the 
reeds, that Nahor, the river Euphrates, was born, and his son 
was Terah the antelope, the Akkadian Dara, a name of la, 
whose ship representing the original ship of the gods, the 
Ma or mother-constellation Argo, was called "the ship of 
the divine antelope of the deep I ." This name of the ante- [ 
lope is apparently a variant form of the Hittite Tar, the goat 
which also meant a deer 2 , and the Hittites were on one side 
of their descent the Iberian Basques, whose sacred mountain 
in the Pyrenees is Aker-larre, now called Aque-larre, the I' 
pasture (larre) of Aker the goat, the Sanskrit Aja. He is > J 
the god presiding at the witches' sabbath, held by tradition j' 
on Saturday, and in the Basque tale of Izar, the star, and 
Lanoa, the mist, it was this god, the grey he-goat, who was 
seen on the mountain as Luzbel, the great (Luz) crow {bel\ 
the king of the wizards, where Izar was hidden as an 

and the grain mixed with the rice-soul, and a part of this is mixed with the 
next year's seed. Skeat, Malay Magic, The Reaping Ceremony, pp. 235 — 249. 

1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 280. 

= Conder, The Hittites and their Language, Sign 141, pp. 231, 156. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 141 

onlooker in a hollow tree watched by his guardian-angel. 
It was thence he descended to heal the wise sun-maiden, 
Sophia, daughter of the king of Parma, who was being slain 
as the dying year-god by the witchcraft of the witches of the 
goat-god, and in this guise he was the May star of the 
Pleiades year heralding the return of the May Queen from 
the land of winter darkness. It was this same goat-god who 
appeared to Izar's brother Lanoa, the mist, when he entered 
the hollow mother-tree as the god of the burning mountain 
vomiting fire, who cast down Lanoa at the close of the 
Pleiades year in October into the pit of darkness r . It is 
this name of the parent-goat which survives in the national 
name of Aquitani, or those belonging to (itani) the goat 
Aker or Aque, given to the Basques of Southern France, 
the land of Aquitaine. 

Thus the union of the two animals, the goat and the 
antelope, in the symbolical name of the national father-god 
of the sons of the Euphrates, marks the union of the 
primitive Basques, sons of the Phrygian goat-god Pan, from 
whom the Indian Male's, who sacrifice goats, are descended 
with the sons of the sun-deer. That the horned-goat, sacred 
to the Akkadian god Mul-lil, lord of the dust (HI), and 
Azuga-Suga, his supreme goat, was the primitive parent- 
totem is proved by the goat-skin dress of the Akkadian 
priests, which is that of the Indian-Vaishya or villagers who 
worshipped the household fire, and by the Akkadian goat- 
god Uz, who is depicted as watching the revolutions of the 
sun's disk 2 . This parent-goat was the Pole Star god, called 
Azaga-siqqa, " the highest and horned one," and also Uz- 
makh, or the mighty goat of Mullil. This god, who sits 
on high in the Pole Star, and watches the movements of the 
sun, became the great god of Gudua or Kutha, the city 
of the dead. He was called Nergal, whose Akkadian name 

1 Monteiro, Legends of the Basque People, pp. i8ff. ; Eys, Dictionnaire 
Basque - Francais. 

1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 285, 286; Biihler, Manu, 
ii. 46, Apastamba, i. 1, 3, 5 ; S.B.E., vol. xxv. p. 37 ; vol. ii. p. 10. 



142 History and Chronology 

is translated by the Assyrian scribes as " the great bright 
one," that is, the Pole Star god. The temple of Borsippa 
near Babylon, the temple of the Holy Mount, with its sides 
facing the four points of the compass, was the temple of the 
god of the North, called Du-azagga, the temple of the goat- 
god x . This was the goat round which the witches and 
wizards danced, and that called Aja-eka-pad or the one-footed 
goat (a/a) by the Hindus, which was the dominant star of 
the Parva bhadrapada, the first half of the month Bhadra- 
pada, the month of the blessed foot (August — September) 2 . 
The name of Aja-eka-pad, the one-footed goat, is given 
in Rg. x. 64, 4, to Brihaspati, the creator, whom I have 
shown to be the Pole Star god in Chapter II., p. 68. 

It was this goat-god who became the Hebrew Esau, the 
Phoenician Usof, the eldest of the twin sons of Isaac the 
corn-god. This was the scapegoat Aziz Azazel, the god 
of the winter season, according to Jewish theology, in which 
the two goats offered at the Feast of Atonement on the 10th 
of Tisri, or about the 1st of October, were dedicated, one to 
Jahveh and the other to Azazel. The goat offered to Jahveh 
was sacrificed on the altar. The goat of Azazel, the strong 
(aziz) god (el), answering to Angra Mainyu or Ahriman, the 
evil spirit of the Zendavesta, was let go into the wilderness 
carrying the sun of the people on its head. The whole 
ceremony was apparently -a survival of the rape of Proserpine 
by the god of the nether world, for She was, according to 
Suidas, called Azesia 3. 



B. The Antelope race, the phallus zvorshippers and house 

builders. 

The sons of the antelope Dara, who superseded the goat- 
father on the addition of the sons of the sun-deer to the 

1 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. chap. xiv. pp. 
183, 184, 189; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. pp. 195, 166. 

2 Sachau, Alberunl's India, vol. ii., chap. lxi. p. 122. 

3 Levit. xvi. 9, 10, 29 ; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. p. 367. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 143 

Satyr confederacy, were the great Dardanian race of Troy, 
descended from Dardanus, the son of the Pole Star god Zeus, 
and his son Ericthonius, the very fertile (epi) earth (%#&>y) 
the snake parent-god Erectheus, who was fed in the Erec- 
theum of Athens as the snake of the tree-mother Pallas 
Athene, whose image was the Palladium of Troy *. Erec- 
theus, who was identified at Athens with Poseidon, the same 
priest officiating for both 2 , was, according to Homer, the 
first keeper of the twelve horses of the year 3, that of the 
twelve months of Orion's year, begotten by Boreas, the 
north-wind of the Pole Star god. It was this god who, as 
Poseidon, gave to Peleus, the god of the potter's clay (iT^Xo?), 
the father of Achilles, his two sun-horses, Xanthus and 
Balios, the yellow and the dappled horse 4, of whom the 
latter was the spotted star Sirius, the Sanskrit Sharvara. 
They thus show a later line of descent than the horses of 
the Indian Krishna, the black antelope-god of the Sharnga 
or horn-bow, whose horses were Shaivya, the son of the 
hill-god Shiva, the constellation Taurus, in which RohinI 
Aldebaran, the mother by Orion of Vastospati, the house- 
hold fire, is the chief star, and Su-griva, the bird-headed 
ape, the Pole Star constellation Kepheus 5. 

The grandson of Erectheus was Ilos, the god II, eel-parent 
god of the corn-growing sons of the wild fig-tree, his parent- 
tree shadowing his tomb 6 , and he, with his two brothers 
Assarakos and Ganymedes, made up the three seasons of 
the Dardanian year. The Assyrian origin of the story of 
descent is affirmed most positively by Lenormant 7, who says 
that their names show Ilos and Assarakos to be the well- 
known gods of the Ninivite pantheon Ilu and Asurraku, the 



1 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. ii. pp. 168, 169. 

2 Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 339, 340. 

3 Homer, Iliad, xx. 225. 4 Ibid., xxiii. 277, 278, xvi. 148. 

5 Mahabharata Sabha {Sabhakriya) Parva, ii. p. 4. 

6 Homer, Iliad, xi. 167. 

7 Lenormant, Note in Gazette Archeologique , 5 (1879), p. 239 ; Frazer, 
Pausanias, in. pp. 202, 203. 



144 History and Chronology 

latter a name of Assur, who was in India the god Ashadha, 
the god of the month June — July, beginning at the summer 
solstice. Ilos, the god of the wild fig-tree growing over his 
tomb at Troy *, was, like the primitive Soma tree-god, the 
Palasha {Butea frondosa), the god of Spring. Assarakos 
was the god of Summer, and his Assyrian name Asurraku, 
a bed, derived from the Akkadian Asurra with the same 
meaning 2 , marks him as the god of the bed of the summer 
sun in the South, the bed of Odusseus, the god of the year 
Path (686s), the star Orion, made by him of the olive mother- 
tree Athene, whence the summer sun was born. 

This bed was, according to the description given of 
his work by Odusseus 3, placed round the parent-olive-tree, 
whose trunk remained as a pillar in the centre. This 
was the stand whence the year-god turned the world's tree 
round as the clay rising from the potter's wheel. It was 
the forerunner of the later oil-press in which the Chakra- 
varti or wheel (chakra) turning (varti) kings of India were 
e supposed to sit. Their seat was the board surrounding 
the beam of the oil-press made to revolve by the oxen 
driven round by the royal drivers. This is the oil-press to 
which the constellation Simshumara or Draco is compared 
in the Vishna Dharma. This, with the stars that follow it, 
is said to be driven round by the wind just as the oil-press 
is driven round by the revolving oxen 4. That this revolving 
bed was the bed of the year-god who dwells inside the 
centre of the canopy of heaven in the tree reaching to the 
Pole Star, is rendered still more certain by the dimensions 
of two other celebrated royal beds, those of Og, king of 
Bashan, the parent of the Rephaim or sons of Repha [Cano- 
pzis), and of Bel in the astronomical temple of Borsippa 
at Babylon. Both of these measured 9 by 4 cubits, or 36 
square cubits ; and that this number is connected with 

1 Homer, Iliad, xi. 166, 167. 

2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 183, note 3. 

3 Homer, Odyssey, xxiii. 190 ff. 

4 Sachau, Alberunl's India, chap. xxii. vol. i. p. 241. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 145 

the year of 72 weeks is further proved by the 70 priests 
of Bel, the seventy being in the age when the seven-days 
week began to be reckoned, being frequently substituted for 
the original 72 T . Again the substance of the bed of Og, 
the ruler of Bashan, the land of the underground stone 
cities, marks its very early age and its original use as a 
revolving measure of time; for it was made of o31j[ 
brezel, meaning iron-stone or diorite. In other words, it 
was a revolving stone of the age of the logan stones, a stone 
supposed, like the black caaba stone at Mecca, to occupy the 
centre of the revolving earth 2 . 

The third or winter sun of the three Dardanian ancestors 
was Ganymedes, taken to heaven to be cup-bearer to Zeus, 
that is to say, appointed to fulfil the office of the Hindu 
Ribhus, of filling the cups denoting the year's seasons. 
But this god, otherwise called Hebe, was originally the 
goddess Ganymeda, whose images are crowned with ivy- 
leaves, and who was worshipped at Phlius and Sicyon 3 as 
Dia, that is a form of Demeter, the goddess of life idi). 
Her festival at Phlius, called the Omphalos or navel of 
the Peloponnesus, was, according to Pausanias, that of the 
ivy cutters 4. He does not give the date of the festival, 
but it was doubtless connected with that of Heracles, the 
Phoenician Ar-chal, wedded to Omphale, which occurred, 
as we have seen, at the winter solstice on the 25th of 
December. Hebe, the youthful maiden, a form of Omphale, 
was, according to Homer, the wife of Heracles 5, and as the 
god's cup-bearer was the regulator of the seasons. In the 
sanctuaries of Heracles cocks, and in those of Hebe hens, 
were kept, and a running stream divided the sexes, mark- 
ing the ritual as that of the sons of the rivers 6 . Hence this 

1 Also see as to the significance of the seventy, Appendix C. 
s Deut. iii. 10, II ; Halevy, Rev. des Etudes fuives, xxi. 218, 222, Bel and 
the Dragon, 10 ; O'Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. i. pp. 151, 152. 
3 Strabo, viii. p. 382. 
* Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 13, 3 — 7 ; vol. i. pp. 90, 91. 

5 Homer, Odyssey, xi. 603. 

6 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 79. 

I, 



146 History and Chronology 

winter mother was Ahalya, the hen, the wife of Gautama, 
and afterwards of Indra, and she answered to the Roman 
Bona Dea, to whom, and to the Fauns or sons of the deer, 
the beginning of December was dedicated. In the ritual 
of the Indian Ho-Mundas, worshippers of the sun-hen, her 
festival is that of the Kalam Bonga, when the rice is re- 
moved from the threshing-floors and the straw is stacked. 
A fowl is then offered,- and this festival of the winter sol- 
stice represents the death of the old and the birth of a 
new year. This solstitial winter month was in the creed 
of the patriarchal sons of the rivers dedicated to the mother 
and father of life and their offspring, the young sun-god J . 

It was from Assarakos, the god of the bed, the summer 
father of the year, that ^Eneas and the Etrurian builders 
of underground tombs cut out of the rock like the stone- 
cities of Bashan, were descended. It was Anchises, the 
father of iEneas, who stole six of the twelve year-horses 
of Laomedon, which were given to Tros by Zeus in 
exchange for his son Ganymedes, who was, as we have seen, 
the sun-hen of the winter 2 . This exchange is parallel to 
that in the Edda, where Hcenir, the sun-horse of the North, 
is given in exchange for Frey, the deer-sun-god, and his 
twin-sister Freya, the sun-falcon, which was adopted by the 
Basques and Indian Chiroos, sons of the bird (C/u'r), as the 
sun-bird in place of the sun-hen. The story, in its variant 
forms, tells of the introduction of the worship of the sun- 
horse of the North, and of the division of the year into six 
male and six female months ; for Anchises when taking the 
six horses of Laomedon substituted for them six mares, thus 
dividing the twelve year-horses into six stallions and six 
mares. This is the division of the year spoken of in 
Rigveda i. 164, 15, 16, where the two sections, the six 
female months of night, that is of the sun going northwards, 
are separated by the seventh or mid-month, the oldest 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. ii. p. 79 ; Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Ho, 
vol, i. p. 329. 

3 Homer, Iliad, v. 265 — 273. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 147 

month Jaistha (May — June), from the six male months 
of day, and both are called the Rishis r . Thus while the 
year-herd of Anchises consisted of six mares and six 
stallions, that of the Veda contained six doe and six buck 
antelopes {rishya), and the age in which the conception 
originated is marked as that of the rule of the antelope-god 
Dardanus. 

This theology of the creating pair was that of the Kabiri, 
current in Lemnos Imbros and all the towns of the Troad. 
It was the theology of the age of phallic worship. In this 
belief the three creating Kabiri, the original three seasons 
of Orion's year, were duplicated by three female counter- 
parts, or rather the three male creating-gods were added 
to the original three mothers 2 . These six year-gods, who 
were, as we shall see, the six days of the week of the new 
Chronometry, were the offspring of a male and female pair, 
the original twins of the Zodiac, called the Mithuna in 
India, and represented as a boy and girl 3. They were the 

1 This mid-month was probably not originally a month but a summer resting- 
place in the bed of the summer-god, answering to the twelve days winter rest 
in the earlier year of Orion in the house of the Pole Star at the summer solstice. 
It appears in the year astronomy of China as the season of the centre, that 
is of the summer solstice, and none of the twelve months are allotted to it. 
It is the season of the sacrifice in the middle court when the Emperor occupies 
the grand apartments in the Grand Fane or Hall of Distinction. It takes place 
according to the Li-chi when the sun is in Gemini and Virgo. Legge, Li-Chi, 
Book iv., Supplement, sect, iii., also Part ii. ; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. pp. 252, 
note 1, 280, 281, 271 ; xxviii. p. 28. If the Vedic year was one like that 
in the Li-chi [dependent on a star, the star was Antares a Scorpio called 
Jaistha. One year in which the mid-month was ruled by Jaistha, Antares was 
the next year described in Chapter V. the cycle year of three years, beginning 
with the autumnal equinox. Antares a Scorpio is called in the ' Tablet of 
the Thirty Stars,' the Lord of Seed of the month Tisri, beginning with the 
autumnal equinox. R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, 'The 
Tablet of the Thirty Stars,' Star xxiii., vol. ii. p. 88. The sun was in Antares 
(Scorpio) in the month Jaistha (May — June) called after it between 14,000 B.C. 
and 13,000 B.C., and Antares continued to rule this and the next succeeding 
solstitial month Asarh (June — July), up to about 10,000 B.C. 

2 Pherecydes, quoted by Strabo, x. 472 ; O'Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. ii. 
p. 828. 

3 Sachau, Alberunl's India, vol. i., chap. xix. p. 219. 

L 2 



148 History and Chronology 

Kami of Japan, Izanagi and Izanami, brother and sister, 
created to " make, consolidate and give birth to " the land 
of Japan, and for this purpose they were provided with 
a churning spear, the Hebrew Shelah, which they made to 
rotate in the ocean till the island rose from the sea. This 
spear was in Grecian mythology the trident of Poseidon 
with which he made Delos to rise from the sea, and with 
it rose the mother Lato, worshipped as a tree trunk, which 
gave birth to the twin creating-gods Apollo, who was 
worshipped in the Troad as Apollo Smintheus, the mouse, 
the burrower in the earth, and Artemis, the goddess of the 
Great Bear r . 

The original parent-pair of Kabiri, who were, according 
to Epimenedes of Crete, male and female, were in Greece 
Hephaistos, the Sanskrit Yavishtha, the most binding (yu) 
god, the one-legged Pole god, the churning spear of heaven, 
and his spouse Aphrodite, the mother-earth born from the 
ocean foam (a^pos) he raised from the sea : she was the 
mother-goddess of the year of the triangle, the Phoenician 
mother Ba. In the Trojan history of these primaeval years, 
Anchises, who first divided the year into male and female 
pairs, became the husband of the "y ear-m °ther Aphrodite, 
and takes the place of the lame, one-legged Pole Star god 
as the potter turning the creating-spear. Two of the year- 
horses he replaced by mares were taken from his son .^Eneas 
by Diomedes, son of Tydeus, the hammering (tud) god, the 
primaeval smith, who became the creating-potter ; and it was 
with these horses that Diomedes won the chariot-race run 
at the funeral of Patroclus 2 , which inaugurated, as we shall 
see in Chapter VIII., the first year of the independent sun- 
god steering his course through the heavens, the year of 
seventeen months of Prajapati divided into seven-day weeks. 

In considering the ethnology of this Dardanian or antelope- 
race who believed in their descent from the male and female 

1 O'Neill, Night of the Gods, Axis Myths, vol. i. 31, 32 ; Homer, Iliad, 

i- 35—39- 

f Homer, Iliad, v. 3*0 — 327 ; xxiii. 290 — 292, 498 — 513. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 149 

creator, we must not forget that in this creed the father-god 
was the god of the North, while the mother was the Southern 
goddess Ba, the Akkadian Bahu. Hence they were a mixed 
race formed by the union of the men of the North with the 
women of the South, and these people were the Pelasgi, 
the sons of Peleg the stream, the sons of the rivers, who, 
according to Herodotus ii. 51, were the founders of the 
Kabirian belief. These were the people who had based 
their system of governments on the village and provincial 
organisation they brought from India, and who had when 
they first settled in Asia Minor and Greece measured time 
by the Pleiades year, and who had made the first year 
of Orion merely a modification of the Munda year of the 
sun-bird. They were essentially conservative, and these 
conservative instincts clung to them after they had intro- 
duced the Northern custom of marriage, and accepted the 
system of patriarchal rule introduced by the sons of the 
sun-deer, who looked on the creating-god as the god of 
the hammer, the divine smith who produced the living spark 
of life, the god Maiichi, the fire spark of the Kushika, by 
striking with the stone hammer the anvil stone whence it 
was to be born. This god with the hammer was the Greek 
dwarf-god Hephaistos, who was, according to Herodotus iii. 37, 
the equivalent of the Egyptian Ptah, meaning the opener 
{patah), and his weapon was the hammer, Heb. Pattish. 
The gods of the Kabiri were the dwarf hammer-gods of the 
Phoenicians, called Patalkoi or the strikers, which they used 
to place in the front of their vessels, and the prophet-bard 
of this confederacy was Orpheus, whose name is the Grecian 
form of the Sanskrit Ribhus. The smithy of this smith- 
creator, before he was cast down from heaven by Zeus to 
become an earthly father-god, was in the mists, where the 
Pole Star god kept the creating rain-seed. Here was his 
anvil, the Greek aic/Aoov, the Sanskrit Ashman, the stone 
which was the parent of Eurutos the Centaur, on which 
the fire spark in the lightning flash was struck from this 
meteoric stone. Eurutos was, as his name shows, the drawer 



150 History and Chronology 

(ipuco) of the heavenly bow, the Sanskrit Krishanu, the slayer 
of the Shyena bird of the winter solstice. The father-smith, 
whose son was the lightning god, the spark of creating fire, 
was the father-god of the matriarchal theology who was 
looked on in the patriarchal age as the creator of the mother- 
race, and we have seen that in the primaeval creed this 
father-god was the great ape. This ape, the Egyptian Hapi 
who became the god Set, was the god who sits on the world's 
tree, and turns it by the pressure of his Thigh, the stars of the 
Great Bear, and thus makes the stars which move with it 
turn round the pole, the stars being attached to the tree 
as its leaves. As the god of the constellation of the Great 
Bear he became the god of the potter sons of Shelah and 
Peleg, descended from the divine potter, the turner of the 
Potter's wheel, the Earth. He was represented in Egyptian 
mythology as Ptah, the potter, and Khnum, the architect, 
and both are portrayed as working the potter's wheel. 
Hence this dwarf-creating potter was a second birth of the 
original ape-father-god, and he thus acquired his name of 
the Great Kabir, which is a northern form of the Dravidian 
Kapi, the ape. Proof of this deduction is given in Egyptian 
picture mythology, where the god Hai, meaning the "shining 
one," is depicted as an ape with an ape's tail, and he who 
is represented as -adoring the light, is followed by Bes in the 
illustration given by Sir Gardiner Wilkinson. Bes, who has 
a lion's head and lion's tail, holds in each of his hands 
a curved sacrificial knife, denoting the lunar crescents, and 
is crowned with the crown of five feathers, denoting the five 
days of the week J . That these two gods represent gods 
of the year is proved by the Book of the Dead, where in 
Chapter XL. 2 , under the Vignette in which Ani, when 
slaying a serpent who has sprung upon an ass whose neck 
it is biting, addresses the god, who here appears in serpent 

1 Gardiner Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, vol. iii. p. 148 ; O'Neill, Night 
of the Gods, the Kabeiroi, vol. ii. p. 813, Axis Myths, The Tat of Ptah, 
vol. i. p. 214. 

2 Budge, Book of the Dead, Translation, pp. 91, 253. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 151 

form as " the abomination of Osiris," and " the eater of the 
ass," who, as we shall see in Chapter V., ruled the cycle year 
of three years, and in Chapter CXLV. 85, the boat of Hai 
is spoken of, showing him to be a year-god with a year-ship 
of his year. This ape and snake-god, whose year preceded 
that of Osiris, is succeeded by the god called Bes, meaning 
fire, also called Seb, meaning a star and fire, and depicted 
as the goose Bes-bes who lays the egg of life *. His image 
as the god with the lion's skin and tail, following or suc- 
ceeding the ape-god, is an Egyptian reproduction of the 
transformation of the ape-god on the banner of the Pandava 
rain-god Arjuna into the ape with the lion's tail, a cog- 
nizance which Arjuna assumed when he, as the unsexed 
sun-god of the year of Chapter VII., set forth in the chariot 
of king Virata driven by Uttara the North, the Northern 
Great Bear constellation of the wagon of the Pole Star god, 
set forth to fight the army of Kauravyas under Duryodhana, 
the chief who fights with the club 2 . 

The original ape-god Hai, perhaps the god of the Indian 
Haihayas, born like the Egyptian Ra in the theology of 
Kushite emigrants from India to Egypt, became the god 
Ptah, who is depicted as the one-legged fire drill and the 
tree -ape -father. He became the prophet Kabir of the 
Indian Kurmis, Koiris, Sikhs, and other tribes who are 
strict monotheists. The Kurmis and Koiris, and the mem- 
bers of the other agricultural castes who follow their creed, 
call themselves Kabir-pantis, and their god Kabir was the 
Pappos or grandfather of the Phrygians, the god Attis. 

The Kabirian Dards, sons of the revolving pillar-bed of 
their ape-father-god, turning round with its central mother- 
tree, were as the descendants of the antelope sun-god born 
of this mother-tree ; and this revolving tree became the 
stem of the first form of the cross "] " the Tau cross of 
St. Anthony, which represented the union of the father with 



1 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien Mgypter, pp. 172, 577. 
* Mahabharata Virata (Go-harand) Parva, xlvi. p. 109. 



I $2 History and Chronology 

the mother-earth. This symbol was the hammer Mjolnir 
of Thor, the god of the Edda, whose chariot was drawn 
by goats. It was the phallic phase of this belief in the 
union of heaven and earth which especially appeared in 
the creed of the sons of the antelope. Their widespread 
historical and religious influence is proved by the position 
accorded to Dardanus, Darda, or Dara, in ancient traditional 
history. It was as the heir and representative of Dardanos, 
" the best beloved of all the sons of Zeus I ," that tineas 
was rescued from Achilles by Poseidon, who was his an- 
cestor Erectheus. Darda, called the son of Mahol, that is, 
according to Gesenius, of the Supreme God, is named, 2 
Kings iv. 31, as one of the wisest of the men who preceded 
Solomon, or Sallimanu, the fish-sun-god of the Akkadians. 
His father is named in 1 Chron. ii. 6, as the fifth son of 
Zerah, the red twin-son of Judah and Tamar, the date-palm- 
tree, and the ethnological difference between the sons of 
the antelope and the deer-sun and the sons of Rai or Ragh, 
the Hindu Rama, the Hebrew Ram, is shown in the same 
genealogy which makes Ram the son of Perez, the breach 
or cleft, who was the twin-brother of Zerah. Both lines traced 
their descent from the date-palm-tree, the tree with the male 
and female stocks, which will only bear fruit when the female 
flower is impregnated by pollen from the flower of the male 
tree ; and its great historical importance will be seen in 
Chapter VI I., where I tell the history of the year of the sexless 
sun-god Bhishma, whose cognizance was the date-palm-tree. 
Of the two lines descended from this phallic parent-tree, the 
red sons of the antelope Dara were the men of the family 
denounced as accursed in Joshua vii. 16-26, by the crime 
of Achan, and they were in India the righting Chiroos or 
Kauravya, vanquished by the Pandavas, while the sons of 
Ram, the ploughing-god, became the peaceable rulers of the 
country. 

The evidence which I have adduced marks Asia Minor 

1 Iliad, xx. 304. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 153 

as the meeting-place of the parent-stems of the composite 
Dardanian race, which was formed by the union of the sons 
of the rivers and the eel-god with the very composite race 
of the deer-sun-god united with the sons of the bear-stars 
of the Great Bear. Their original parent-river was, as we 
have seen, the Kur, rising in Mount Ararat, the river Daitya 
of the Zendavcsta, and their progress thence through the 
land of Elam to the East of the Tigris is shown by the state- 
ment of Herodotus i. 189, who speaks of the Dardanoi as 
dwelling in Kurdistan on the banks of the Gyndes, a northern 
tributary of the Tigris, and it is their descendants who are 
now the Dards of Dardistan in Northern India. They 
belong to the country of the Hanza-Nagar of Chitral, and 
are wearers of the Dard cap. It was they who with their 
allies came down to India as the Naga race, and their head- 
dress is there represented by the pith helmet of the Chiroos, 
who succeeded the Kharwars as rulers of Magadha. This 
helmet is given by every Chiroo bridegroom to his bride 
at their marriage. This gift of the helmet also takes place 
at the weddings of the Hele Jats, the oldest tribe of the 
cultivating Jats, worshippers of Rama, the plough-god J . 
This hat is the survival of the Tartar hat worn by the clay 
images of the mound-building races of the Toda country, 
still found in their graves 2 . 

This line of march of the Basque fire-worshippers and 
potters, who brought into India, through the passes of the 
North-west, the crops of Asia Minor and the patriarchal 
customs of marriage, is confirmed by the local geography 
of their route and by the history of the Zendavesta. This 
tells us that their first settlement in the South-west of Asia 
Minor was the petroleum yielding land of Baku, through 
which the Kur river flows, called Ataro Patakan, the land 
of Atar, the fire-god. Thence they passed into the Median 



1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Chiroos, vol. i. p. 201 ; Elliot, Sup' 
plementary Glossary, N. W. Provinces, Jats, p. 486. 
a Hunter, Gazetteer of India, vol. x. p. 322. 



154 History and Chronology 

country of Ragha, " of the three races I ." This was the land 
of the sun-god Ragha, whose name became in Akkadian 
cosmological history Lakh-mu, who, with his female counter- 
part Lakha-mu, were the male and female creators, born 
of Apsu, the deep, or Mum-mu Tiamat, the chaos of the 
sea 2 , the goddess Ba-hu. It was to this pair of two gods 
.forming one bi-sexual creator that Beth-lehem, the shrine of 
the sun-god of Palestine, was dedicated. Its name means, as 
Dr. Sayce has shown, the house (beth) of Lakhmu, and it was 
there that, according to St. Jerome, Ep. 19, the annual death 
and rebirth of Tammuz or Dumu-zi was celebrated. From 
Ragha and Elam the fire-worshippers went Eastward to the 
Oxus or Ji-hun, the river of life (j'z), and entered the land 
of Sauka-vastan, the modern Seistan, the home of the Saka 
or wet race, sons of the Akkadian god Sak, dominated by 
the Akkadian mother-mountain of Khar-sak-kurra. Thence 
they entered India, and for the records of their progress 
there, and the order in which the invading bands followed 
each other, we must turn to Indian sources of information. 

The earliest Indian account of this immigration is that 
given in the Gond Song of Lingal. Lingal, the Gond 
creating god, is the Indian form of the Akkadian Langa, 
of which Nagar, a workman, the Gond Nagar, the plough, 
is a dialectic form 3. This god is the Semitic Lamech, whose 
two wives, Adah and Zillah, the reproductions of the two 
tiger wives or outer prongs (p. 160) of the Pharsi Pen trident, 
are the Assyrian Edu or Idu, darkness or shade, and Tsillu- 
Tsir-lu, the race (/«) of the snake (tsir). The former was 
mother of those who have cattle, the pastoral Gautama 
and Todas, and the latter of the artificers the potters and 
weavers, and of Naamah the beautiful, a name answering 
to Kallisto, the most beautiful Great Bear goddess 4. These 
wives of the father phallic god, the god of the pillar-bed, 

1 Darmesteter, Zcndavesta Vendidad Fargard, i. 16 ; S.B. E., vol. iv. p. 8. 

2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. vi. pp. 384 — 388 ; Lect. ii. pp. HI. 

3 Ibid., Lect. iii. pp. 185, note 3, 186. 

4 Gen. iv. 19 — 23 ; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadicns, p. 135. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 155 

are in the Zendavesta, Savangha-vach, the speaker of the 
speech (vach) of the East, and Erina-vach, the speaker of 
the speech of Ira or Iran. They were the daughters of 
Yima, the great shepherd, the twin, the bi-sexual parent- 
god, the maker of the garden of God r , who wore the gold 
year-ring of Ahura Mazda. This garden was the well tilled 
fields of the mixed pastoral and agricultural people. They 
were first wives of Azi-Dahaka, the biting snake with three 
heads 2 , the god of the three seasons of Orion's year repre- 
sented as the triad trident, the husband father, the summer- 
god of the pillar-bed, between his two wives spring and 
winter. Savangha-vach, the spring, is the equivalent of 
Tsir-lu, the goddess-mother of the fire in stones, Berezi- 
Savangha, the witch-mother of the sorcerers, from whom, 
in the genealogy of the Shah-Namah Tura, the Turanian 
father is descended ; while Erina-vach, the mother of Airyu, 
the bull, is the equivalent of Edu or Idu, the mother 
of Jabal or Abel, the shepherd, is the winter-mother 
of the pastoral sons of the river and the eel. The Song 
of Lingal gives us the genealogical history of the Turano- 
Dravidian sons of the witch-mother of the artificers or 
builders, the men of the megalithic monuments of the 
Neolithic age, who came from Asia Minor, and amalgamated 
with the former dwellers in the land described in the pre- 
vious chapters. Their history is told in the third, fourth 
and fifth cantos of the Song of Lingal, which tells of the 
birth of the second race of Gonds brought to life by the 
regenerated Lingal, who, after he had been slain by the first 
Gonds he had established in the land and taught to grow 
rice, was revived by the Amrita or water of immortality 
given to him by Kirtao Sabal, the crow or raven messenger 
of the gods. On his resurrection he asked Mahadeo, the 
creator, the Pole Star god, for a new race of Gonds, but 

* Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendldad Fargard, ii. 2 — 19; S.B. E., vol. iv. 
pp. 10—15. 

2 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Aban Yasht, 34; S. B. E., vol. xxiii. pp. 61, 62, 
note 2. 



156 History and Chronology 

their release from the mother-mountain was refused till 
he brought the eggs of the black Bindo-bird, the original 
cloud-bird, Khu. Lingal went to the Western seashore to 
seek for them, but found them watched by Bhour - nag, 
the fire-snake, the burning sun of summer, the guardian 
village-snake, who had already killed seven broods of the 
young rain-birds. He killed the snake and was brought by 
the mother-cloud-bird, together with her offspring, to the 
Devala-giri mountain, whence the Yamuna or Jumna, the 
river of the twins ( Yama), rises. He came there as the 
god of the South-west monsoon, who brings up the rains of 
the summer solstice. Hence he is the central summer-god. 

On his arrival the new race of Gonds were born, who 
proceeded to show their origin by cooking their meal of 
the foreign millet brought from the North called Kesari 
(lathyrus sativd). While they were cooking it the monsoon 
rains began to fall and flooded the whole country. Lingal 
and the four parent Gonds of the new race were saved by 
Dame, the tortoise (Kaswal), and Puse, the alligator, called 
also Muggar or Mugral ; Lingal by the tortoise, and the four 
Gonds by the alligator, the constellation Draco of the 
Ribhus. Their saviour tried to devour them, and they 
were finally brought across the flooded country and down the 
river of the Twins by the tortoise. When landed at the junc- 
tion of the Jumna with the Ganges, Lingal taught them to 
build houses (damn), the family houses of Dame, the parent 
of the Kushite or tortoise race, and a town called Nur-bhumi, 
that of the hundred (nur) lands, the central capital of 
India, which became afterwards Kusambi, the mother-city 
(ambd) of the Kushites 1 . He also gave them bullocks and 
carts, taught them to grow millets, Jowari {Holcus sorghum) 
and Kesari {lathyrus saliva), the latter of which is sown at 
the end of the rains as a second crop, mixed with the rice 
grown on rich upland soil. He divided the people into 
four tribes, (1) the Mana-wajas, who made the images of 

1 This is situated close to the junction of the Jumna and Ganges. Cunning- 
ham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 391 ft". 



of the Myth- Making Age. 157 

the gods ; (2) Dahak-wajas or drum-beaters ; (3) Koila- 
butal or dancers, and (4) Koi-kopal, the cow-keepers, who 
were the ruling tribe. With these he united the four Gond 
tribes he had brought in his first avatar as Sib, the shep- " 
herd-god, whose ethnology I have already described, p. 108 : 
(1) the Kolarian Korkus or Mundas ; (2) the Bhils, sons of 
the bow (billa) ; (3) the Kolamis, who marry by simulated 
capture, and (4) the Koto-tyul, or sons of the log of wood, 
the Marya, or tree Gonds. These formed the eight united 
races who peopled the Indian tortoise earth. 

The central kingdom of this tortoise earth, the bed of 
the pillar-king, was the country called in Sanskrit Maha- 
Kosala, or the great Kushite land also known as Gondwana. 
It is named Jambu-dwipa, the land of the Jambu tree, and 
called in the Mahabharata the land of the Vid-arbas or 
double four (arbct). This is the land ruled by Rukmi, 
king of the Bhojas, that is of the race now known as the 
artisans and mercantile carriers of India, who were the 
sons of Druhyu, the sorcerer Drah. He was king of the 
sons of the tree (rukh) x , and the wielder of the bow of 
India called the Vi-jaya, or double thunderbolt, the 

double trident, \ ( , the weapon with which the Assyrian god 



Merodach or Marduk, the calf-god, is armed in the bas-relief 
depicting his combat with the bird-mother Tiamat 2 , the 

Dorje )| of the Northern Buddhists. His sister Rukmini, 



that is his female duplicate, was wife of the black antelope 
god Krishna 3. 

This is the land wherein the Ner-budda or Nur-mada 
and the Sone rise from the central hill or navel of the 
primaeval gods Umur-kuntak, and flow west and east 

1 The Hindi word for tree, our Rook in chess. 

2 Goblet d'Alviella, The Migration of Symbols, p. 97, fig. 44. 

3 Mahabharata Udyoga {Sainya Niryana) Parva, clviii. pp. 458, 459, Adi 
(Sa/nbhava) Parva, lxxxv. p. 260. 



158 History and Chronology 

as the mother-rivers of the united worshippers of the tree- 
sun and Pole Star gods. It is here that the sacred lotus- 
flower of Indra in India, and Ra in Egypt, is indigenous, and 
to this mother country every Brahmin must devote the 
sixth of the nineteen meditations of his Sun-kalpa or 
daily service. It is there called the land of the Jambu-tree 
(Eugenia jamboland), through which the Nurbudda flows from 
east to west, and the sun-god of this central home of the 
gods is said in the third subject of meditation to be the 
white hog of Vishnu r . 

Lingal placed among the confederated Gonds of Jambu- 
dwipa priests called Pradhans or Ojhas, who married the 
new comers to the daughters of the earlier immigrants, 
taught them how to make the gods of wood and stone, 
the gnomon-pillar and year-gods, to sacrifice to them goats, 
cocks, and a calf, to drink spirits (daru), and to dance the 
religious dances. After giving them his final instructions he 
vanished, bidding them as his farewell precept to be (l true 
to the Tortoise 2 ." The tribes or castes of these millet- 
growing Kushikas were, as we see by their names, bound 
together, not like the Southern village sons of the tree or 
the Northern sons of animal totems by an assumed com- 
munity of descent, but their bond of union, like that of trade- 
guilds, was community of function, a change which marked 
an advance in civilisation, and the beginning of active 
trade. 

It is in the gods made by these makers of symbols of the 
form of the creator that we find one of the most certain 
clues to their national history. The earliest god image was 
that of the wooden snake Sek Nag, the Akkadian god Sak, 
who ruled the Indian Ocean and the South-west monsoon, 
which fertilised the land. He is the god called Bhour Nag in 
the song of Lingal, and his true name Sek and his ritual 
are now at all events hidden as profound secrets only known 

1 Beauchamp, Dubois' Hindoo Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies, vol. i. 
chap. xiii. p. 147. 

2 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 223. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 159 

to the initiated. He is worshipped only once in every 
seven years, and then only by males, who must appear 
before him naked, showing that the ritual dated from 
a time before clothes were worn. His shrine is under 
a Saja tree {terminalia tomentosa), and seven cocoa-nuts, 
which only flourish under sea breezes, and show that his 
rule extended to the sea, seven pieces of betul nut, milk, 
and flowers are offered to him, but no animal victims. In 
short he is the father-snake-god of the sons of the tree T . 

The successor of the aboriginal deity of the Dravidian 
Marya Gonds, and the first Ugro-Finn immigrants, was the 
bisexual god still worshipped by the Gonds at their ordinary 
festivals, represented by the male bamboo javelin, the Shelah 
or Spear of the Hebrew Kushites, cased in a hollow or 
female bamboo, and coated with Kusha grass like the Yupa 
sacrificial stake of the Soma sacrifice. This Yupa, the 
descendant of the GondVpear-god, was girt with three ropes 
of Kusha grass, denoting the three seasons of the year, at 
a level with the sacrificer's navel 2 . 

The god which was adopted as the national deity by the 
millet-growing Gonds who swore to be true to the tortoise, 
was the Pharsi-pen, meaning the female {pen) trident (pharsi). 
The rules for its construction given in the Song of Lingal 
are as follows. The Dahak-wajas of the drummer tribe 
were sent into the jungle to cut a female bamboo, and into 
this an iron trident called Pharsi pot was fixed. The socket 
bamboo and the trident Pharsi were then bound together 

1 The ritual of the worship and secret names of this god were told to me 
by the High Priest of the Raj Gonds in Chuttisgurh in the Central Provinces. 
I shall never forget the day when he came to tell me this secret, of which I had 
not the most remote previous conception. He had been for nearly a month 
in the habit of coming almost every day to my tent, and I had many long 
conversations with him as to Gond manners, customs, and creeds, but on this 
clay he came to me trembling in every limb, with the sweat pouring down 
his face, and when I asked him if he was ill, he said, " No, I am quite well, 
but we have talked together so much over our customs that I feel I must tell 
you this secret, which I am bound not to reveal to any one, and for divulging 
it I should be killed if I was discovered." He then told me the whole ritual. 

' Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 7, 1, 19, 20; S.B.E.,vol. xxvi. p. 172. 



160 History and Chronology 

by a chain of bells, the sign of the bell-god Ghagara or 
Gangara, and consecrated by pouring a jar of spirits (daru) 
over it. 

This trident-god, of which the prongs were originally 
of wood, was first the god of the typical tree y representing, 



like the Caduceus of Hermes .^S^ called by Homer 




TpnreT7)\o<;, or the three-leaved sign, the three parent shoots of 
the two cotyledons, and the plumule issuing from the three 
roots A described on p. 30. These united ^ form the 
original sign of the dorje or double thunderbolt, the six- 
rayed star which surmounted by the crescent is the crest 
on the Turkish banners and the sign for star in the Cypriote 
syllabic alphabet. It shows by its name, the female trident, 
that it was originally the trident of the three mother- 
goddesses. These were in stellar astronomy the Pleiades 
Bahu, the abyss, and the raven constellation Ma or Argo. 
In the mythology of these first builders of houses (dama) 
they became the parent-goddesses of the years measured 
by the Pleiades and the solstitial sun, united by the Pole 
Star mother. Hence in the trident of Pharsi Pen, these 
spring and winter goddesses, its two outer prongs, became, 
as the Song of Lingal tells us, the two tiger wives of the 
central prong-god. They are there called Manko Rayetal 
and Jungo Rayetal, that is to say, they were the mothers 
of the sons of the tiger. These are the people known in 
Buddhist history as the Vajjians, the sons of the tiger 
{Pali Vyaggho, Sanskrit Vidghra), whose united confederacy 
of eighteen tribes ruled North-eastern India and Kashi 
(Benares), called Videha, the land of the two ( Vi) races 1 , 
and also like Central India Kosala. Thfese, who were a 
later confederacy than that of the original eight tribes of 
the Kushika, were the nine tribes of the Mallis or Mundas, 
the mountain people answering to the four primitive tribes 

1 Jacobi, Jaina Sutras Kalpa Siitra, s. 128; S.B. E., vol. xxii. p. 266. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 161 

of the Gonds, and the nine tribes of the Licchavis, the sons 
of the dog (Akk. Lig), the warlike traders who worshipped 
the fire-mother, called in the Rigveda Matarisvan, the mother 
of the dog (svan), answering to the four tribes of the artisan 
Gonds. The earliest nucleus of this confederacy was the 
alliance of the first Gonds introduced by Lingal with the 
aboriginal founders of villages, the daughters of Rikad 
Gowadi, the village (gowd) son of the squirrel (Rik) 1 . 

The northern partners of the daughters of Rikad Gowadi 
were the Mundas or Mons who came from China. They 
were the people of the Tsu or united states of the southern 
side of the valley of the Yang-tsi-kiang or Yellow River, and 
were, as we have seen on p. 119, intermixed with the hairy 
sons of the bear in the confederacy of the Lolos. According 
to a legend quoted by Terrien de la Couperie, they were 
born of a child suckled by a tiger, and were divided into 
the Pan-hu or Pan-ngao, the Indian forest (bun) Nagas, sons 
of the squirrel, and the Miao or cat tribes 2 . These last 
were the race of the Eastern wizards, sons of the hawk- 
mother-goddess Freya, whose car was drawn by two cats. 
These were the two seasons of the solstitial year, as in 
Egypt the cat-mother-goddess Bast, a form of Hat-hor, the 
mother of Horus the sun-god, bears on her forehead the 
year-circle or disk with a snake creeping under it, and is 
associated with another goddess, Sochit, the village goddess 
of the high and low land, the goddess of the summer heat 3. 

C. The Kushika Faun house-builders in Greece and Italy. 

It was these two tiger or cat-mothers who became the 
mother-goddesses of the sons of Dame the tortoise, the 
Kushika house (dama) builders. They survive in the caste 
of Doms, once rulers of Oude and Behar, who have left 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay Hi., pp. 192, 193; 
Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. pp. 112, 1 13. 

3 Terrien de la Couperie, The Languages of China before the Chinese, pp. 
'9> 38 — 42, 61, 70, 105. 

3 H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie den alten JEgypter, pp. 333, 649. 

M 



1 62 History and Chronology 

traces of their former power in the names of the forts of 
Domdiha and Domangurh. They formerly ruled the country 
on the Rohini, the river named after the star Aldebaran, on 
which Kapila-vastu, the birth-place of the Buddha, is situated, 
for Ramgurh and Suhankot on this river are Dom forts. 
They thus protected the Gautama, the clan of the Buddha, 
who are still the chief landowners in the Rohini country. 
They are represented among the Babhans, the caste to 
which most of the ruling Rajas of Behar belong, by the 
sub-section of Dom-Katar, the men of the peculiar curved 
knife {katari) of the Doms, the knife of the crescent moon. 
They are basket-makers by profession, and the Chaparia 
sub-caste builds the bamboo frame-work supporting the 
thatched roof of a house. Their connection with the 
Kushikas is shown by their marriage ceremonies, in which 
a thread soaked in turmeric and oil, and knotted with blades 
of darva or Kusha grass, is tied round the right wrist of the 
bridegroom and the left of the bride I . The name of their 
building-mother, Dame, marks their relationship with the 
worshippers of the two goddesses, Damia and Auxesia, or 
Azesia in Greece and Damia in Italy, of whom Azesia is, 
as we have seen, stated by Suidas to be Persephone. They 
originally came from Crete, the maritime centre whence 
Indian cults were introduced into Greece, and the ritual 
of their sacrifices is, according to Pausanias, the same as 
that of the worship of Demeter at Eleusis. The name 
Damia, according to Hesychius, means, like the Gond Dame, 
the " building goddess," and their worship was especially 
conspicuous in the ritual of Epidaurus, the city consecrated 
to ^Esculapius, the divine physician, son of KorSnis, the raven- 
mother, to whom cocks, the sun-birds of the Indian sons of \. 
Dame, were offered. Damia and Auxesia were also local 
gods of Trcezen, the city whose coins are marked by the |e 
trident, and of JEg'ma.. The people of the island stole them 

1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Babhan, vol. i. p. 31, Dom, vol. i. pp. 
240 — 251, ii. Appendix, i. p. 41 ; Sir H. Elliot, Memoirs of the Raees of the 
North-west Provinces of India, Dom, vol. i. p. 84. 



of tJie Myth- Making Age. 163 

from Epidaurus, which had received from Attica the olive 
wood of which their images were made, and in requital 
of this gift sent yearly offerings to Athens to Athene, the 
olive tree-mother-goddess, and Erectheus Poseidon, the snake- 
god of the trident. The ^Eginetans, according to Herodotus, 
set up a special shrine for them at Oia in the centre of the 
island, thus distinguishing them as the goddesses of the 
central Hir-men-sol or sun-gnomon pillar. There they were 
worshipped by two choruses of dancing-women, who, by 
abusing one another, marked their patrons as goddesses of 
rival seasons. They were appointed by the ten superin- 
tendent priests assigned to each goddess. These dancing- 
women were clearly the Indian village women who danced 
at the seasonal festivals, and these dances were accompanied 
by the throwing of stones r . 

It is in Italy that we can trace the ritual of this Creto- 
Grecian festival and the history of the gods worshipped in 
its rites most perfectly to their original source. Damia was 
worshipped at Rome under the name of the Bona Dea, who 
was, as we have seen on p. 146, the Indian Ahalya, the hen, 
the Greek hen Hebe, filler of the cups of the seasons, and 
the winter goddess. But she was originally the May goddess 
Persephone, and hence her festival was on the Kalends of 
May, that is, on our May Day. She was invoked as Damia 
in Tarentum and Southern Italy, and her priestess was called 
Damiatrix 2 . Hence she was a Dorian goddess of the races 
who adopted the Dorian custom of common meals. She, 
like ^Esculapius, was a healing deity, in whose temple healing 
herbs and the snakes carried by ^Esculapius were kept, and 
a sow was offered to her at her festival. It, like the Thes- 
mophoria, was a festival of women from which men were 
excluded ; and it was said to have been held while Hercules 
was driving away the cattle of Cacus, whom he had slain, 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 30, 5, 6, 32,2 ; vol. i. pp. 117, 118, 121 ; iii. pp. 266, 
267 ; v. p. 192 ; Herod, v. 82—87. 

2 Paulas, 68 ; W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, pp. 105, sect. 5, 
note 5, 104, sect 4. 

M 2 



164 History and Chronology 

and the women refused to give him water, that is to say, 
treated him as an alien usurper. As M. Breal has proved 
that Cacus, called by Dionysius Halicarnassus Ka/cios, is a 
form of the Greek /ccu/ctas, the name, according to Aristotle, 
of a wind that brings up the rains, that is originally of the 
South-west Monsoon 1 , it is clear (1) that this May Day 
festival of the goddess Damia was one of the two seasonal 
festivals of the Pleiades year, of which the other was the 
Thesmophoria of October — November ; (2) that both were 
brought from India to Greece and Italy in matriarchal times, 
when the village women danced at the seasonal festivals; and 
(3) that it was a festival praying for good rains to the rain- 
god of the Monsoon, who was afterwards vanquished and 
deprived of the cows of light by Hercules. He, in Italian 
mythology, was not the Phoenician Archal, the Greek 
Herakles, the god of the solstitial sun, but a seed-god, one 
of the Semones, and guardian of the household enclosure 2 , 
in other words, the guardian-snake. In some forms of the 
Cacus legend he is called Sancus, and he was thus the 
Sabine god Semo Sancus. Sancus, derived from the root 
sac or sag, is a form of the Akkadian wet-god Sak, the god 
of the " sagmen," or sacred branch of grass, which in Rome 
was held by those who took solemn oaths, and borne as 
their credentials by Roman Fetiales or priestly ambassadors. 
In short, he was the god of the sons of the sacred Kusha 
grass, the Naga Kushikas, worshippers of the ploughing and 
guarding Naga snake, the plough-god of the constellation 
of the Great Bear, and of the national Ara Maxima, sacred 
to Sancus, which succeeded the village and provincial grove- 
altars of the earlier faith 3. 

This May Day festival of Azesia Damia, the earlier goddess 
of the second season of the Pleiades year, became in the 
Gond ritual the Akkhadi or ploughing festival held on the 

1 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, p. 102, sect. 1 ; Breal, Hercule et 
Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, p. 6, Formation de la Fable, p. Ill, 
- The god of the Hercus, the Greek UpKos, meaning an enclosed plot. 
3 M. Breal, Hercule et Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, pp. 51—58. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 165 

1 8th of Baisakh (April — May), the New Year's festival of 
the Gond year, and probably that inaugurated in the original 
version of the story of Hercules and Cacus with the death 
and dethronement of the latter. It is then that the new 
millet used as food for horses, called gram, is eaten, as at the 
feast of firstfruits at the beginning of the Pleiades year in 
November, the making of agricultural implements begun, 
and the plough, though in India at that season the earth 
is as hard as a brick, passed lightly over the land. The 
year thus initiated is that of a confederacy of craftsmen, 
which each workman, according to the custom observed at 
Rome, and also among the Cymri of Britain, began by 
working for a short time at his trade r . 

D. The gods of the six-days week. 

It was apparently contemporaneously with the institution 
of this new year with its inauguration festival that Lingal, 
before his departure as the god of the old faith, established 
the worship of the six Gond gods, and thus doubled the 
number of the three trident gods. These gods are : (1) Bhim- 
sen, the Hindu Bhima, the god of the fire - worshipping 
Dosadhs of Magadha, the priests of Rahu. He was the 
Pandava Bhima of the Mahabharata, son of Maroti the 
tree (marom) ape-god, called the brother of Hanuman, the 
god of the club or lathi, his weapon in war, that is to say, 
of the male-bamboo or fire-drill 2 ; (2) Mata the mother, 
the Bun-di or forest {bun) mother of the Dosadhs, the goddess 
of the village grove ; (3) Mata Mai, the second mother, 
the Sokha or witch-mother of the Dosadhs. These three 
form the prongs of the trident ; (4) Goraya, the boundary- 
god, the encircling snake ; (5) The ape-god called Hanuman 
the smiter, or Maroti the tree-ape ; (6) Pandahrl or Mu- 
Chandri the moon-goddess 3. These last three gods are the 

1 Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, N. W. Provinces, Akhteej, p. 13. 

2 Vana ( Tirtha- Ydtra) Parva, cxlv. p. 439, Adi {Sambhava) Parva, xcv. 
p. 286. 

3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Tunes, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 235, 202. 



1 66 History and Clironology 

three roots of the national tree, and the whole six represent 
the six days of the week which was now substituted for 
the original five-days week. 

The New Year's festival of the year reckoned by six-day 
weeks, the Hittite week of creation, was apparently that 
called in the Rigveda the Tri-kadru-ka, of that of three 
trees (dru) of Kadru, the mother-goddess of the Naga or 
serpent race. It is said to be begun on the day when 
Indra drank the Soma brewed from barley, before he went 
forth to kill the dragon who imprisoned the maiden of the 
year, the May Queen of the New Year 1 . It lasted for six 
days, and was called also the Abhi-plava, or that of the 
boat or water-bird {plava), that is of the moon-boat or 
bird. The gods invoked in the orthodox Soma ritual are 
Jyotih the stars, Go the cow, and Ayuh the son of life, 
that is to say the Pleiades mothers and the antelope or 
ox fathers of the Great Bear, the two parent constellations 
of the Naga race 2 , and the son of life, Ayuh, born from 
them under the auspices of the moon-cow. The first three 
days are dedicated to each of these in the order I have 
named. They are also worshipped on the last three days, 
but in a varied order, Go the cow being worshipped on the 
fourth, Ayuh on the fifth, and Jyotih on the sixth day ; and 
that this six-days feast belonged to a method of time 
reckoning which assigned six days to the week is proved 
by the statement of Sayana, quoted by Ludwig, that there 
were five periods of six days in the month of thirty days 3. 
Also that this festival called the Abhi-plava was one in 
which the gods ruling the coming year were especially in- 
voked is shown by the ritual regulating it, which required the 
Bri-hat and Rathantara Sanians, those celebrating, as I have 
shown on pp. 69, 70, the seventy-two weeks of the year, to 
be chanted at mid-day on alternate days for the six days 

1 Rg. ii. 15, i, 7, 8; ii. 22, 1. 

2 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. i, 2, I ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 282, 283. 

3 Ludwig, Dcr Rigveda, vol. iii., Mantra Literatur, p. 3S9, s.v., Tri- 
kadru-ka. 



, of the Myth- Making Age. 167 

of the feast T . The three tree-mothers worshipped in this 
festival were the Sal-tree-mother of the Dravido-Mundas, the 
Fig-tree-mother of the ploughing immigrants from Syria, 
and first the Mahua and then the Am or Mango tree, the 
parent-trees of the Kurmis, the first of the lower agricultural 
castes, and thus the latest immigrants from the North, who 
irrigated their lands and grew corn and the sugar-cane, 
from which the Ikshvaku kings, sons of the sugar-cane 
(ikshci), took their name. For this tree the phallic wor- 
shippers substituted the date-palm-tree, the tree of male 
and female stocks, which was in the Mahabharata the 
cognizance of Bhishma the sexless sun-god, and of Vala- 
rama the plough-god, called Halayudha, or he who has 
the plough (Jial) for his weapon 2 . 

The Akkadian counterpart of this festival was the six- 
days feast held at the summer solstice to celebrate the 
death, rebirth and marriage of Dumu-zi, the son {dumit) of 
life (zi), the Star Orion. This New Year's Day coincides 
with that of the Zends, and adds a further proof to those 
I shall produce later on, to show that the year of the six- 
days week was one beginning with the summer solstice 3. 
This festival was like all those of the Gond ritual originally 
accompanied with the consumption of intoxicating drinks, 
the barley Soma which Indra drank on this day, but for this 
was substituted in later ritual the Soma of Indra's three 
mixings made of milk, sour milk and barley mixed with 
running water 4. A similar change seems to have taken 
place in Rome in the ritual of the Damia festival, for the 
temple of the goddess was not allowed to be defiled with 
wine, though this, according to Macrobius, was permitted 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., xii. 2, 2, I, 12 ; S.B. E., vol. xliv. pp. 152, I53> 
148, note 1. 

2 Mahabharata Bhishma (Bhishma- Vadha) Parva, xlvii. p. 165, Shalya 
(Gud-Ayudhd) Parva, xxxiv. , lx. pp. 135, 233. 

3 Lenormant, The Myth of Adonis Tammuz according to Cuneiform Documents, 
pp. 164, 165; C. Boscawen, The Academy, 27th July, 1878, p. 91. 

4 Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologie, p. 239 ; Rg. v. xxvii. 5 ; Hewitt, Ruling 
Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. } Essay iii., p. 242. 



1 68 History and Chronology 

to be surreptitiously brought in under the name of milk 
and in a vessel called the Mellarium or honey-vase. This 
points to a connection between this festival and the cult 
of the dwarfs of the Edda, who made mead for the 
gods from the milk of the goat Heid-run, who feeds on 
the leaves of the mead-tree Lserath. Hence her milk 
became the mead drunk every day at the banquet of the 
gods who feast on the flesh of the boar Scehrimnir. But 
in the Roman ritual milk was the only libation allowed 
to be offered to the rural gods Pales, Silvanus, and Ceres, 
the last the Roman form of Demeter \ 

This evidence marks the libations of milk as belonging 
to a ritual earlier than that of the mead-drinkers, and a form 
of worship introduced at a time when the pastoral races, 
the Todas of India and the Massagetae of Herodotus, drank 
nothing but milk. These people were the successors of the 
Mundas, who, to the present day, like the Kikatas of the 
Rigveda, never milk their cattle 2 , and were allied to the 
Cyclopes, or one-eyed Pole Star worshippers, whose chief, 
Polyphemus, had never tasted intoxicating drink till it 
was given him by Odusseus. There are thus apparently 
in Indian history three stages marked by the national drink 
customs. The first, that of the Dravido-Mundas, who, from 
time immemorial, drank the rice-beer, which their women 
still brew for the seasonal dances. Next, that of the milk- 
drinking Gautamas and Todas, and the third, that of the 
mead-drinkers of the North, who belonged to the race of 
the sons of the potter, who became in India the Kushika 
Gonds. Mead was apparently the first intoxicating drink 
brewed in the North, and for its history we must turn to 
the theology of the Mordvinian Ugro-Finns, now dwelling in 
the upper streams of the Volga north of Astrakhan. Their 
chief god is Chkai, the creating potter of the phallic wor- 



1 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, p. 103, sect. 2 ; Mallet, Northern 
Antiquities : The Prose Edda, 38, 39, pp. 429—431. 

2 Rg. iii. 53, 14. 



of the Myth-Making Age, 169 

shippers, who made men from potter's clay *. He is thus 
a counterpart of the Greek Peleus, son of the potter's 
clay, to whom Erectheus Poseidon gave the first two 
horses of the sun. 

He was the father of the six national deities, three male 
and three female, the three father and mother gods of the 
six-days week. The female goddesses representing the 
three original mothers are : (1) Nechkendi Tevter, the 
spring-goddess of the bees, and mother of Ponquine Paz, 
the lightning god. She is apparently an equivalent of the 
Hebrew prophetess Deborah, the bee, the nurse of Rebekah, 
wife of Isaac, the corn-god, and the partner of Barak, the 
lightning, who was buried under the oak of Bethel, where 
she was worshipped, for it is called " the oak of weeping," 
that is to say, the oak-mother of the dying and re-rising 
sun-god of the Druid's year 2 . (2) The second goddess is 
the queen of summer, who is by her brother, Nouziaron Paz, 
the mother' of Martyr Paz, giver of fertility, whose home 
is guarded by dogs, the dog-stars Sinus and Procyon. 
(3) The third goddess, the winter - mother Venai Patiai, 
was goddess of fruits and mother of Varma Paz, god of 
the winds. 

The male equivalents and partners of these three year- 
mothers are : (1) Inechke Paz, called also Chi-Paz, the god 
of fire {Chi), the fire-drill of the human beehive of four stories 
of which he, as the father of all the hives, rules the highest, 
the place of the Pole Star god. (2) The second, the spring- 
father, is Vernechke Velen Paz, god of the world's hive. 
(3) The third, the summer-father, is Nouziaron Paz, god 
of night and sleep, and also the moon-god, Odh-koiiozais, 
who receives the souls of the dead. He is the twin partner 
of his summer sister, mother of Martyr Paz, and the two 
represent the Fravashis or bi-sexual parents of the Zends 
who are worshipped at the annual feast to the dead, held 
at the summer solstice when the Zend year begins. (4) 

1 Max M tiller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. i. p. 252. 
' Gen. xxxv. 8 ; Judges v. 



170 History and Chronology 

The fourth or winter-god is Ouet-ze Paz, god of flocks and 
herds r . 

This hierarchy of the worshippers of the prophet bee, 
the mother of the mead which inspired the national priests, 
is that of the votaries of the first of the three Zend sacred 
fires, that of the age described in the Zendavesta as that 
when " the glory went from Yima," the twin father of Sa- 
vangha-vach and Erena-vach, the two wives of Azi-Dahaka, 
in the shape of a Varaghna-bird, that is, of the rain (var) 
cloud, the Gond Bindo-bird 2 . This is the fire Fro-bak, 
that of the Turanian Fryano, the men of the Viru or phallus, 
established according to the Bundahish in Khvarizem, the 
Hvairizem of the Yashts, the country of Seistan, south 
of the Oxus, the land of Herat, watered by the Harahvaiti, 
the original Sarasvati, and the tenth of the lands created 
by Ahura Mazda 3. This birth-land of the Kushikas is 
that occupied by the fire-worshippers before they entered 
India to make their descent down the Jumna, and before 
they made their mother-land Kuru - kshetra, the field 
{kshetra) of the Kurus, watered by the Vedic mother 
Sarasvati, the daughter-river of the Harahvaiti of Herat. 

This fire Frobak was the fire of Frashaostra, the first 
of the three assistants of Zarathustra, who was the Hindu 
Prashastrl or teaching priest, whose name is the Sanskrit 
form of the Zend Frashaostra, the Ojha or man of know- 
ledge {pdjli) appointed by Lingal. This Ojha, inspired by 
the god of knowledge, the Odin of the Edda, is the priest 
still elected in Chutia Nagpur as the High-Priest of every 
Parha, whose duty it is to superintend the professors of 
witchcraft and magic, to see that their work is lawful and 
beneficial, and to judge and punish those who practise the 
black magic of the makers of pestilences and the causers 

1 Max Miiller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. i. pp. 235 ff. 

2 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Zamyad Yasht, 35; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 294. 

3 West, Bundahish) xvii. 5 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Mihir Yasht, 14 ; 
Vendtddd Far gar d, i. 13; S.B.E., vol. v. p. 63; xxiii. p. 123, note 4, 
iv. p. 7. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 171 

of national and domestic calamities. This Frashaostra 
was the father of Hvogvi 1 , the Zend form of the Sans- 
krit Shu-gvi, the coming (gvi) Shu - bird, the Khu 
cloud - bird, the Varaghna-bird, who bore to earth the 
glory from Yima, and she was the wife of Zarathustra. 
She was also the prophet priestess, who was originally 
inspired by the mead made of bees' honey, the leader of 
the Melissai or bee nymphs, who nursed the young Zeus 
in Crete, and who were the priestesses of Demeter, the 
year-mother, and of Damia. It was she who got from 
Zarathustra the better and more holy inspiration than 
that of mead given by his unintoxicating but enlighten- 
ing prophet drug Bangha {Cannabis Indica), the Hashish 
by which the Zoroastrian priests were inspired 2 . It was 
the reverence for the honey-drink which made the Hindu 
sons of the tortoise call the fire and boar year-god Vishnu 
Madhava, or the god of Madhu mead, and which made 
them make the Mahua {Bassia Latifolia) their sacred tree. 
It is from the flowers of this tree that the drink now called 
Madhu or Daru is distilled, but before the days of distil- 
lation the Northern immigrants made from the fermen- 
tation of its excessively sweet flowers, much sought after 
by the jungle bears, a liquor like their Northern mead. 
This is the Madhu parka or honey-drink ordered by Manu 
to be given to kings, priests, sons and fathers-in-law, and 
maternal uncles, paying a visit a full year after their last 
coming 3. It is thus a new year's drink, and one especially 
connected with the seasonal sacrifices, for it was not to 
be given to a king or priest unless a sacrifice was offered 
j when they came. This Madhu made of Mahua flowers 
I was the national drink in the age of the Kauravyas and 
Pandavas of the Mahabharata, consumed, as the poem tells 
J us, at their religious festivals and marriages, both by men 
I and women, and by the goddesses DrupadI and Subhadra, 

1 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Aban Yaskt, 98 ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 77, note I. 

Ibid., Zendavesta Din Yasht, 15; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 267, note 3. 
3 Biihler, Manu, iii. 119, 120; S.B.E., vol. xxv. pp. 96, 97. 



172 History and Chronology 

and also drunk by the gods Krishna and Valarama, who 
were apparently looked on, like the gods of the Edda, as 
seeking inspiration in drink z . It is to a Mahua tree that 
husbands are first married in their own homes among the 
Bagdis, Lohars, and Bauris, the last of whom look on 
the dog as sacred, and are thus marked as belonging to 
the worshippers of the household fire, and as connected 
with the Bhil hunters, who set a similar value on their 
dogs. After this marriage they are united to their brides in 
the marriage arbour made of Sal branches (Shorea robusta), 
the Munda parent-tree, round which the bride walks seven 
times after she enters in it before she sits opposite to or 
beside the bridegroom. It is also to a Mahua-tree that 
Kurmi, Lohar, Munda and Santal brides are married, and 
the Bagdis show their descent from the spring whence the 
mother-river of the sons of the river rises, by placing a 
pool of water in the marriage arbour between the bride 
and bridegroom. There is no ceremony of circumam- 
bulating the fire in these marriages, but the bride and 
bridegroom go round the tree to which they are married 
seven or nine times. Most of these marriages are accom- 
panied by a simulated capture of the bride, and the bind- 
ing ceremony uniting husband and wife is the tying of the 
clothes of the couple together, and that called Sindurdan 
or the marking by the bridegroom of the parting of the 
bride's hair with Sindur or vermilion. 

The Bauris bury their dead with the head to the north 2 , 
like the Mundas and Mallis of Ayodha or Oude, among 
whom the Buddha died with his head to the north between 
the two Sal trees in the Upavattana or village grove of 
Sal trees of the Malli city of Kusinara, the town of the 

1 Mahabharata Adi (Sabkadrd- Havana) Parva, ccxxi. pp. 604, 606, Adi 
{Khandava-daha) Parva, ccxxiv. pp. 615, 616. Virata (Vaivahika) Parva, lxxii. 
pp. 183, 184, Ashvamedha {Amigitd) Parva, lxxxix. pp. 226, 227, Mausala 
Parva, i. 29, iii. 15, 16, pp. 3, 7. 

2 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. pp. 39, 8o, 81, 531 ; vol. ii. 
pp. 23, 229, 102. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 173 

Kushikas I . The Bagdis burn their dead and throw the 
ashes into a stream, and hence show an affinity with the 
men of the Bronze Age, while the Bauds still remain in 
the Neolithic Age when the dead were buried 2 . It is to 
this last age that the institution of the Ojhas or priests 
of knowledge (odj) must be assigned, for it was when he 
appointed these accredited teachers and judges, and con- 
secrated the trident of Pharsi Pot, that Linga vanished from 
the earth. This trident god of the Gonds, whose prongs 
denote the three seasons of the year, is worshipped also by 
the Badagas of the Nilgiris, who boast their descent from 
the Northern Himalayas, and who are the cultivating caste 
subordinate to the milk-drinking Todas, and also worship- 
pers of the tiger 3. 

E. Immigration of the sons of the raven and the antelope 
into India. 

I must now, after having traced the history of the Gond 
immigration in India, return to the fire-worshipping races 
whose progress I have tracked from Asia Minor to Seistan, 
and relate from the Zendavesta and Hindu records the 
history of the successors of these Gond millet-growing 
immigrants who came into India as the second or barley- 
growing race. The Zendavesta tells how the first band 
of the phallus and fire-worshippers established themselves 
in Seistan as the Turanian subjects of the great irrigating 
King Frangrasyan, who covered the country with water 
channels leading into the Kyansih or Kashava sea, the 
lake Zarah into which the Helmend flows 4. Frangrasyan, 
the king of the Fryano or sons of the Viru, with his brothers 
Aghraeratha, he of the foremost chariot (rathd), and Kere- 
savazda, he of the horned (keresd) club (vazda), were the 

1 Rhys David, Mahapari-nibbana Sutta, v. I — 3 ; S.B.E., vol. xi. p. 85. 
- Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. p. 42. 

3 Elie Reclus, Les Primitifs, pp. 225, 275, 276. 

4 West, Bundakisk, xx, 34; S.B. E., vol. v. 82. 



1/4 History and Chronology 

sons of Pashang, whose brother was Vaisakh, that is the 
Indian mid-month (April — May) of the Pleiades year 1 . 
Aghraeratha, the eldest of the three brethren is called 
G5-patshah the king (bads hah) of the cows of light, the 
ruler of the year of two seasons of Pashang and Vaisakh, 
that is to say he of the foremost chariot was the leading 
star, and his ally was Syavarshan, son of Kavi Kush, who 
is said to be the creator of the land of Kang-desh or India, 
the country now called Kangra in the Punjab 2 . Thus 
Aghraeratha was the ruling god of the year of three seasons 
of the tortoise race in India, founded upon that of the 
Pleiades. He, the star Canopus, was deposed and slain 
as the ruling star by Frangrasyan when Orion was sub- 
stituted for Canopus as the ruler of the year. 

But both Aghraeratha and Frangrasyan were sons of 
Pashang the Vedic Pushan, the barley-god eater of Karam- 
bha, rice and barley porridge, who makes cows to calve, 
whose car is drawn by goats, and who married the daughter 
of the sun 3. His name comes from the root Push, the 
growth of plant life, and is connected with the Akkadian Pu, 
a pool or marsh. As the sibilant sh represents an original 
k, he is the eastern form of our fairy King Puck, who 
was once the Lithuanian Purk or Perkunas, the thunder- 
god 4. He is also the god who leads the Hindu year, 
beginning at the winter solstice with the month Push 
(December — January), and became in stellar astronomy the 
constellation Cancer, called by the Arabs Alnathra. This 
in the Malayan cosmogony is the constellation of the great 
Crab which dwells in the cavern of the Navel of the seas 
at the roots of the world's tree, that is in the winter 
resting-place of the Southern sun at the winter solstices. 

1 West, Bundahish, xxix. 5, xxxi. 15, 16 ; S.B.E., vol. v. pp. 117, 135. 

2 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Zamyad Yasht, 77, Abdn Yasht, 41 ; S.B.E., 
vol. xxiii. pp. 304, 64, note 1 ; West, Bahman Yasht, 24; S.B.E., vol. v. 
p. 224. 

3 Rg. iii. 52, 7, vi. 53, 9, vi. 58, 4, vi. 55, 3, 4. 

4 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 437 — 439. 

s Sachau, Alberuni's India, chap. lvi. p. 84 ; Ibid. , Clu-onology of Ancient 



of the Myth- Making Age. 175 

In short he represents the union of the Southern black- 
cloud-bird Khu with the Northern thunder-god Thor of the 
Edda, whose car, like that of Pushan, is drawn by goats. It 
was his Northern sons Frangrasyan and Keresavazda that 
came down to India to conquer the matriarchal races ruled 
by Syavarshan. Keresavazda's name the horned club shows 
him to be the god of the worshippers of the male as 
distinguished from the original female trident of Pharsi 
Pen. These people are the Takkas or artisans, still known 
as a wealthy and powerful tribe in Kashmir and the Punjab. 
Their god is the trident or trisula, representing the three 
seasons of the year in its three prongs called Shesh Nag, 
the spring, Vasak or Basak Nag the summer, and Takt or 
Taksh-Nag the winter l . They founded the great city of 
Taxila or Taksha-sila, the rock {silo) of the Takkas, so 
celebrated in Buddhist history, and in that of Alexander 
the Great's Indian campaigns. This capital of the early 
Naga faith was taken by Janamejaya, son of Parikshit 
the circling sun, after he instituted the great snake 
sacrifice which substituted sun-worship for that of i the 
earlier star and moon-gods, and avenged the death of his 
father, who was slain by Taksh Nag the winter-god, as the 
last sun-god of the Pole Star era of time-measurement, 
when the sun was looked on as a day-star going round 
the heavens and subordinate to the Pole Star 2 . Janamejaya, 
the god victorious (jayd) over birth (janam), is represented 
in the Mahabharata as the successor of Paushya or Push, 
who, as well as himself, was the pupil of the sacrificial priest 
Dhaumya, the god of the smoke [dhumo) of burnt-offerings, 
called also Gautama, whose wife was Ahalya the year- 



Nations, chap. xxi. of the Lunar Stations, p. 352 ; Skeat, Malay Magic, 
p. 7. 

1 Oldham, 'Serpent Worship in India,' Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 
i8ai,pp. 361, 362, 387—391. 

2 Mahabharata Adi {Pattshya) Parva, p. 45, Adi (Aslika), Parva, 1. — lviii. 
pp. 143—160. 



176 History and Chronology 

hen J , who was, as we have seen on p. 163, the winter wife 
of the sun-god Ar-chal, and the goddess Damia or Dame, 
the Gond tortoise-mother worshipped as the goddess of the 
house-building races of Greece and Italy. 

Near Taksha-Sila, according to Hiouen Tsiang, was the 
shrine and sacred tank of the Naga father-god of the Takkas 
Ila-putra, the son (putra) of Ila, whose body stretched from 
thence to Kashi {Benares), and who was the god worshipped 
at the great Hindu national temple at Somnath or Ila-pura, 
on the coast of Kathlawar, where his image was a Linga with 
a lunar crescent on its head. This proves him to be the 
Gond god Lingal, who had become on his disappearance 
from earth the sixth Gond god, the Crescent-moon goddess 
Pandhari or Mu-chandri. Hence these Takkas were both 
sons of the eel-god Ila, and worshippers of the trident and 
also sons of the rivers, whence the parent-eel was born, 
and they extended their rule all over India, and have left 
records of their sovereignty in the names they gave to 
the rivers they called Iravati, and adopted as their parent 
streams in the countries they ruled in their progress from 
the North-west to the South-east. These are the Ravi of 
Punjab, the Rapti of Oude, and the Irawadi of Burmah, 
all forms of the original river name Iravati. They were 
the sons of Iran or Erenavach, and she was the mother- 
mountain Ida, Ila or Ira, mother of the eel race whom 
Manu raised from the sea after the flood which followed, 
as we have seen in the Lingal Gond story the arrival of 
these immigrants. She in her new avatar was born from 
the four-fold sacrifice of butter, sour-milk, whey and curds. 
This made her, who had originally been the little fish, 
the infant eel, in Manu's water-jar or water-pool, become 
the horned fish, the dolphin, which led Manu and his 
moon - boat to the mother-mountain, where she became 
the mother of the sons of the cow, the Gond Koi-kopal 
or dairy farmers 2 . 

1 Mahabharata Adi (Pan shy a) Parva, iii. pp. 45 — 51, Ashvamedha (Anugita) 
Parva, lvi. pp. 145 — 148. 

2 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 8, 1, 1 — 15 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 216—218. 



of the Myth-Making Age. lyy 

The dolphin-mother became in Syria and Greece the 
goddess Derceto or Tirhatha, meaning the cleft or rock- 
pool, and the dolphin Apollo. In the Euphratean countries 
she was the goddess Nana, whose leaden image with the 
triangle round the navel, as in the Hindu altar in the 
form of a woman, was found in the city on the site 
of Troy, dating back to the earliest period of the Bronze 
Age, the second from the bottom of the six cities there 
superimposed on one another. The image is of Indian 
lead, the produce of the Indian Galena silver mines of 
Saurashtra, for the mines of Laurium or Attica, which 
supplied lead in a later age, were not yet opened, and 
there was no lead found in any mines of that age near 
the coast, except those of India. This leaden image 
was found in a separate hoard, chiefly of gold ornaments, 
hidden in the city wall, and all these were of Indian pat- 
terns r . Similar figures in terra-cotta have been found in 
Mesopotamia, Cyprus and the Cyclades, and in Maeonia 
(Lydia), the land of the Tursena, the Mediterranean re- 
presentatives of the Indian Turvasu, an image of the 
Akkadian goddess Nana has been found engraved on 
syenite, with the Babylonian god Bel standing by her side 2 . 

In India the dolphin-goddess was the river-fish of the 
national religious history, the porpoise of the Ganges called 
Makara, the cognizance of Pradyumna, the foremost (pra) 
bright one {dywnnd), the eldest sun-god, born of the year- 
god Krishna 3. This succeeded, in religious ritual, the alli- 
gator of the Gonds, Muggar, Mugral or Puse, and became 
the star called in Tamil Makaram, and by the Akkadians 
Makkhar 4, the constellation Capricornus, which has always 



1 Schluchhardt, Schliemann's Excavations, pp. 6, 7, fig. 60 ; Hewitt, Ruling 
Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 170. 

2 Wilson, ' The Swastika.' Reports of the American Smithsonian Institution, 
j p. 829. 

3 Mahabharata Anushasana (Amcshasinika) Parva, xi. 3, p. 41. 

4 R. Brown, Jan., F.S.A., 'Tablet of the Thirty Stars.' Proceedings of the 
Society of Biblical Archceology, Jan., 1890, iv. pp. 13 — 16. 

N 



178 History and Chronology 

been represented as a goat with a fish's tail I . This con- 
stellation was deified as the parent constellation of the 
Pitaro Barhishadah, who sat on sheaves {bar his) of Kusha 
grass at the feast of the dead held at the autumnal 
equinox, and were the successors of the sons of Muggar 
the alligator of the age of Orion's year. 

These Takkas of the mead-drinking age of Europe, on 
entering Kangra or Kang-desh in India, found themselves 
in the land of the Madrikas or drinkers of intoxicating 
drinks {mad), the national rice and murwa {millet) beer. 
They were the subjects of the king Shalya, who in the 
Mahabharata is the father of MadrT, the second wife of 
Pandu, the sexless god of the Great Bear, as the constella- 
tion of the seven Rishyas or antelopes. This father-god 
Shalya is the god of the point of the arrow {Shalya), that 
is to say, he was in the theology of the arrow year of 
three seasons the winter season answering to the god 
Taksh Nag, and in the account of the alliance between 
the Takkas and the Madrikas in the Mahabharata the former 
are called Vahlikas or the men of Balkh. They came from 
Balkh on the Oxus, under the lead of Vahlika, the third 
god of the triad of Shan-tanu, Devapi and Vahlika. Shan- 
tanu, whose name means the healing-god, and Devapi, his 
rain-priest, are described in Rg. x. 98 as the sons of Rishti- 
sena, the god of the fire-spear (rishti), and are represented 
as invoking Brihaspati, the Pole Star god, for rain. They 
were thus the spring and summer seasons of the year, and 
Shan-tanu is, as we shall see by his marriage with the 
mother-river Gunga and SatyavatI, the sister of Matsya, the 
fish-god, the eel-father of the royal races of India, the sons 
of the Kauravya and Pandava kings. The Vahlikas, led by 
Somadatta, son of Vahlika, and Somadatta's son, Bhuri- 
shravas, marched under the banner of the Yupa or sacrificial 
stake, the Takka trident, and joined the Kauravyas in 



1 Hewitt, Riding Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. L, Essay iv., pp. 
375—377- 



of the Myth-Making Age. jyg 

their war with the Pandavas. They were both slain by 
Satyaki, son of Shini, the moon - goddess, the father of 
ten sons slain by Bhurishravas, and these ten sons and 
their father represent the year of eleven months, of which 
the history will be given in Chapter VI. 1 

These Vahlikas, Madrikas and Rakshasas or sons of a tree 
(rukk), are all denounced by Kama in the Mahabharata 
as sacrificers of living victims, which they ate, who indulged 
in intoxicating drink. He describes their dancing seasonal 
festivals, at which the women, eaters of beef and pork, and 
bearing on their foreheads the red arsenic or Sindur mark 
of marriage, danced while drunken, and says that at Shakala 
or Sangula, Shalya's capital, one of these was held on every 
fourteenth day of the dark half of each month, when the 
dying moon about to reappear as the new moon of the next 
month was worshipped at a festal dance, in which a Rak- 
shasa woman beat the drum 2 . This was clearly a monthly 
festival, held on the twenty-ninth of each month of Orion's 
year of the Karanas. 

These fire-worshipping warriors, who sacrificed living 
victims, bound them to the three-headed sacrificial stake 
by their necks, according to the custom attributed in the 
Brahmanas to the Fathers who succeeded those who killed 
their victims by a blow on the forehead which broke their 
skulls 3. Their necks were so tied that the blood flowing 
from the jugular artery when severed fell on the sacrificial 
stake, and thence on the consecrated ground in which it 
was fixed ; and it was by this mingling of the blood of their 
totem victims with the soil of each new land they occupied 
that they completed the formation of blood brotherland 
between them and the hitherto alien land, just as they 

1 Mahabharata Udyoga {Amvnpakyana) Parva, cxcvii. p. 558, Bhishma 
{Bhishmavadha) Parva, Ixxiv. pp. 272 — 274, Drona ( layadratJia-badhd) Parva, 
cxlii. — cxliv. pp. 428 — 441, Drona {Ghatotkacha- badha) Parva, clxii. pp. 

523-525- 

2 Mahabharata Kama Parva, xliv. 8 — 29, pp. 152 — 154. 

3 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 8, 1, 15 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 189. 

N 2 



i8o History a?td Chronology 

united themselves to its daughters by the symbolical infu- 
sion of blood typified in their marriage customs. This 
blood was probably, as it was in ancient Scandinavian 
sacrifices, smeared over the altars for the bettering of the 
year ; and that the sacrifice was one of the Pole Star age 
of worship is proved by the rule that the Agnidhra or fire- 
kindling priest should go round the fire on which the victim 
was to be cooked three times against the course of the sun x . 

The geography of the Mahabharata marks the progress 
of these Takkas through India by placing them as the 
Tri-gartas, or people of the three (tri) pits (gartas), in which 
were fixed the sacrificial stakes to which the victims were 
tied, in the country south of the Sutlej, on the borders 
of Kuru-kshetra. These were the Gond tribe called Koi- 
kopal or cow-keepers, the sons of Kai-kaia, mother of 
Bharata ; and they are described in the Virata Parva of the 
Mahabharata as the chief allies of Duryodhana, the Kauravya 
chief, when he invaded the country of the Viratas, or men 
of the Viru, also called Matsya, the sons of the eel-fish, and 
tried to steal their cattle. 

In the Rigveda they are called the Tugra, who were 
conquered by Indra with the Vetasu, the sons of the reed 
(vetasd) 2 , who are said to be possessed of tenfold magic 
power 3. In another hymn Indra is said to drink the drink 
of the Tugras4, that is to be the god of the drinkers of 
strong drink in the first stage of his mythology as the 
eel-god of the early fire- worshippers. In Rg. x. 49, 4, Indra 
is said to have entrusted these magicians, the Tugra and 
Vetasu, to the charge of Kutsa, his yoke- fellow ; and the 
beginning of his metamorphosis as the god of the water- 
drinkers is shown when Indra, as one of the twin-pair Indra- 
Kutsa, is asked to separate himself from Kutsa 5. 

Kutsa is called Arjuneya, or the son of a fair (arjuna) 
mother 6 , and also Puru-Kutsa, or Kutsa the Puru, whom 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. S, 1, 16; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 1S7, note 1. 

2 Rg. vi. 26, 4. 3 Ibid., vi. 20, 8. 4 Ibid., viii. 32, 20. 
5 Ibid., v. 29, 9, x. 38, 5. 6 Ibid., iv. 26, 1. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 181 

Indra aided by breaking down the seven towers of the 
enemy, and it was for the beautiful young Kutsa that he 
slew Shushna, the demon of drought *. 

These Purus, descended from Puru, the son of Yayati and 
Sharmishtha, the most protecting [sharman) tree, the Kushika 
Banyan fig-tree, succeeded Yayati, son of Nahusha, the great 
snake of the Naga race, as rulers of India ; and their rule 
preceded that of the Yadu-Turvasu, sons of DevayanI, the 
sun-maiden of the six Devayana months from the winter 
to the summer solstice 2 . These last were, according to the 
Mahabharata, the Yavanas or growers of barley (yava), whose 
rule began after the age of Orion's year. 

The Purus or Pauravas were a brother-tribe to the Druhyus 
or Bhojas, the offspring of Druhyu, the eldest son of Shar- 
mishtha, and both are said in the Rigveda to belong to the 
Nahusha or Naga races 3. They, as the sons of Druh the 
sorceress, the Druj of the Zendavesta, were sorcerers and 
magicians, and both were opponents of the Tritsu, or wor- 
shippers of the perpetual altar - fire, whose priest was 
Vashishtha, for they were overthrown in the battle of the 
ten kings, when Indra gave the land of their brethren, the 
Anu, to the Tritsu 4. The Purus are in this passage called 
Mridhravac, an epithet which, according to ZimmerS, marks 
them as speaking a non-Aryan language. Its meaning is 
uncertain, but whether it means speaking softly, that is, 
using the soft sounds of the Dravidian and Pali languages 
instead of the Sanskrit gutturals, or speaking imperiously 
as enemies of the Aryan Tritsus, it distinctly shows them 
to belong to the Pre-Sanskrit population of India. This is 
also clear from their connection with the Anus, descended 
from Anu, the second son of Sharmishtha, who are called 
Mlecchas or outcasts in the Mahabharata. Kutsa, the 
young and fair leader of the Pre-Sanskrit Purus, is the 

1 Rg- i- 63, 7, 3- 

- Mahabharata Adi (Sa/ub/iava) Parva, lxxxv. pp. 258 — 260. 
3 Rg. vi. 46, 7, 8. * Ibid., vii. 18, 13. 

5 Zimmer, Altindisches Leben, chap. iv. pp. 114, 115. 



1 82 History and Chronology 

reputed author of twenty-one hymns in the first Mandala 
of the Rigveda, in which he describes himself as the 
priest of the Varsha giras, the praisers (giras) of rain, who 
belong to the Naga race of the Nahusha I . That this 
confederacy included the Takkas or Tugras, and the 
Turanian races of the early Gond stock, is clear from the 
history of the Zendavesta. For in it Frangrasyan and 
Keresavazda are said to have been finally conquered and 
slain by Hu-shrava, the glory of the Hus, the successor 
of the Kavi-kush kings, whose sacrament was the holy 
Haoma or Soma, and who is said to have united the Aryans 
into one kingdom, and killed the Takka Tugra leaders 
Frangrasyan and Keresavazda behind the Chaechasta lake, 
the modern Urumiah in Ataro-patakan 2 . That this cam- 
paign extended to India is shown by the account given 
of it in the Rigveda, where Su-shravas, the Sanskrit form 
of the Zend Hu-shrava, the king of the barley-growing 
Turvayana or Turvasu, is said to have overcome Kutsa, 
Atithigva, the coming (gva) guest (atithi), that is Divodasa, 
the king of the ten {das ha) gods or months of the three 
years' cycle described in Chapter V., and Ayu, the son of 
UrvashI the fire-socket 3. This evidence clearly shows 
that the Takkas, Tugras or Trigartas, the men of the sacri- 
ficial trident-stake, joined themselves to the Eastern or 
Puru Naga confederacy, of which Kutsa was the divine 
high-priest, that of the Vetasu or sons of the river-reed, who 
worshipped the rain-snake-god and the sun-god born of the 
tree, and were thus united with the Eastern Malli or moun- 
tain-races. The name of Kutsa, their high-priest, derived 
from Ku [where), is a divine epithet of the unseen god allied 
to that of Ka {who), given to Prajapati {Orion) as god of 
the sacred Drona or tree-trunk, the hollow wooden jar 
containing the sacred Soma or divine sap 4. 

1 Rg. i. ioo, 1 6, 17. 

2 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Aban Yasht, 40, Cos Yasht, 17, 18, 21, 22, 
Zunyad Yasht, 74 — 77 ; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. pp. 66, note 2, 114, 115, 303, 304. 

3 Rg. i. 53, 10. 

4 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. 5, 5, n, iv. 5, 6, 4 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 408, 410. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 183 

These early fire-worshippers, bearers of the sacrificial 
tridents, whom I have thus traced as conquering- and ruling 
races from Asia Minor to the junction of the Jumna and 
Ganges, were the people to whom the authorship of the 
Second Mandala of the Rigveda is described. Its title is 
Grit Samada Bhargava Saunaka, interpreted by Ludwig and 
Brunnhofer to mean the book belonging to {grit) the col- 
lected (saw) Median race (Mada), the sons of Bhrigu {bhar- 
gava) the fire-god Bhur, belonging to the dog (saunaka). 
This tells us that the Thracian Bru-ges ; the Phrygians 
of Asia Minor, the Phlegyans of Greece, who worshipped 
the god Bhur, came to India through Media as the followers 
of the fire-dog. 

This is the dog which always follows all Parsi funerals, 
the holy dog of the Bauris and Bhils, and especially sacred 
to the sons of Bhrigu, who are said in the Rigveda to have 
first found the concealed household fire by the help of 
Matar-i-shvan, the mother (ma tar) of the dog (shvan) I , and 
to have brought it to men 2 and placed it on the navel 
of the world 3. This holy dog, born of the wooden fire- 
socket, that is as the son of the mother-tree, became in 
ritualistic astronomy the dog-star Sirius, the dog of Orion, 
the god Tishtrya, or he of the thirtieth (tishtrya) day of the 
month of the Zendavesta, who defeats the demons of drought 
and brings up the sun of the summer solstice 4. 

This totem-dog of the fire-worshippers, which according 
to Herod, i. 140 no Magian will kill, was the dog who woke 
the Ribhus from their twelve days' sleep at the winter 
solstice s. That is to say, it was the herald of a new year 
then begun, and it was as the year-dog that it was like other 
totem year animals sacrificed at the end of its term, as the 
god of the dying year, to make way for his successor. It is 
to this sacrifice that allusion is probably made in Rigveda 

1 Rg. x. 46, 2, 9, i. 60, I, iii. 5, 10. - Ibid., i. 58, 6. 

3 Ibid., i. 143, 4. 

4 Uarmesteter, Zendavesta Tir Yashl, vi. 10 — 34; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. pp. 
96—104. s Rg. i. 161, 13. 



184 History and Chronology 

iv. 18, 13, where Indra tells how after killing Vyansa, the 
alligator-year-god of the Ribhus, he ate dog's entrails 
together with the Soma brought to him by the Shyena 
or frost {Shya) bird of the winter solstice. The sacrifice 
succeeding that which began the year at the winter solstice 
with the sacrifice of the dog was that of the dog of the 
summer solstice, probably that referred to in the story 
of Shuna-shepa, the dog's penis, or the male dog. He was 
the second son of Aji-garta, the pit (garta) of the goat, 
that is of the priest of the Tri-gartas or three sacrificial pits. 
His eldest brother was Shuna-puccha, the dog's tail, and the 
youngest Shuna-langala, the dog's plough or head. They 
were the three seasons of the dog's year of Orion. Shuna- 
shepa, the dog-god of the summer season, was sold by his 
father for sacrifice in place of Rohita the red god, the fire- 
drill son of Hari-chandra, the moon (chandra), of Hari the 
name of Vishnu the year-god as the son of the mother 
Shar 1. 

The sacrifice of the middle god of the trident, the god 
of the summer solstice, as the god of the dying year, marks 
a change in the year reckoning coincident with. the abandon- 
ment of the five and the adoption of the six-days week 
of the phallus worshippers, and this change appears in the 
ritual of the three seasons of the Chatur-masya. The 
offerings to the Vaishvadeva gods of the spring season and 
the Saka-medha offerings to Indra as Saka, god of winter, 
consist of baked cakes, boiled rice and curds, and the same 
ingredients are offered to Varuna as god of the summer 
solstice ; but to these are added in the ritual of his sacrifice 
a ram and a ewe made of barley-meal, but which doubtless 
represent living victims once offered, which were originally 
goats and human beings 2 . This offering is made on the 
northern altar, especially erected for the sacrifice of the ram 
to Varuna and thatched with branches of the Plaksha trees 

1 Haug, Aitareya Brdkmana, vol. ii. pp. 462 — 469. 

2 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., ii. 5, 2, 15, 16 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 395. 

3 This Plaksha or Pakur tree is that consecrating the meeting-place of 



of the Myth- Making Age. 185 

(Ficus infectoria) placed on the altar on which animal victims 
were to be offered. The southern altar is dedicated to the 
Maruts or tree- ape {maroni) goddesses, the Egyptian apes 
who sing the praises of Ra in the language of Uetenu, the 
green {net) land of India x , and it is they who are invoked 
as leading goddesses in all the three seasonal festivals 2 . 

This change in ritual, consequent on the introduction 
of the worship of the sun of the summer solstice, is also 
marked in the Zend year reckonings. For they began their 
year at the summer solstice with the feast of the dead 
Fravashis or mothers, the Maruts of the Hindu ritual. It 
also appears in the Celtic custom of lighting the year's fires 
on St. John's Day instead of in November, and at the' winter 
solstice, as in the years of the Pleiades and deer-sun. 

In this summer year sacrifice of Shuna-shepa, as described 
in Rg. i. 24, 13, the dog is said to have been bound to three 
sacrificial posts (drupadas), at each of which probably 
a separate dog for each season was sacrificed. These posts 
were in the ritual of the Trigartas placed in three pits, 
into which the blood of the slain victims was collected. 
This blood was in the Arab ritual of these sacrifices 
drunk and the flesh eaten raw by the sacrificers 3, and this 
custom of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the 
victims in the days of early sun-worship appears in the 
Scandinavian ritual, where the year-god Hadding, the hairy 
{had) sun-god, in alliance with Lysir, the one-eyed Pole Star 
god, slays the fire- wolf Loki, drinks his blood and eats his 
heart 4. Also Sigurd, the sun-god of the pillar (urd-r) of 
victory (sig), when he slew Fafnir, the snake-god of the 

the Northern and Southern races at Puryag at the junction of the Jumna 
and Ganges. 

1 Brugsch, Religion unci Mytliologie der Alten sEgypter, pp. 152, 153. 

- Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 5, 2, 5 — 10, iii. 8, 3, 10; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 
392, note 1 — 394, xxvi. p. 202. 

3 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect vi. p. 210, Lect. ix. 
pp. 324, 327. 

4 Powell and Elton, Saxo-Grammaticus, Introduction, p. 119, Book i. 
pp. 28, 29. 



1 86 History and Chronology 

earlier ritual, when standing in a pit over which the year- 
snake passed as Sigurd stabbed him, and Regin, the rain- 
god, Sigurd's guardian and Fafnir's brother, drank the 
blood of the slain year-god I . 

In the earliest Hindu ritual these three posts, each in its 
pit, represented the three seasons of the year, just as in the 
later Soma ritual the eleven posts for living victims slain at 
the Soma sacrifices represented the eleven months of the year 
of the sun-horse, to be described in Chapter VI. ; and the 
sacrificial year-dog was as the rising sun of the new year 
called back to life by the six Aditya, the six days of the 
new week of the Tri-kadru-ka year, Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga, 
Varuna, Daksha and Ansha 2 . This early sacrifice of the ; 
year-dog by the mead-drinkers is reproduced in Greece in \ 
the sacrifice of black dogs and honey and water (nephalia) ;," 
to Hecate, the dogs offered to Herakles and Ares at Sparta, 
also those sacred to yEsculapius, son of Koronis, and kept in 
his temple, and whose flesh was given to patients as a 
medicine, a custom derived from the Thracians, who, accord- 
ing to Sextus Empiricus, used to eat, and therefore to 
sacrifice, dogs 3, a custom continued by their descendants the 
Indian Bhrigu. 

A further N account of the coming to India of the introducers 
of the household fire is told in the Brahmana story of 
Mathava. He, the god who produces fire by rubbing 
{math), is called the Vi-degha, or king of the two {vi) 
countries {degha desha), the North and the South. He 
carried into India Agni Vaishvanara, the fire of the village 
(vish), and the household fire of the village grove (vauam), 
under the guidance of Gotama the cow-born {go) father 
of the Indian Brahmins, called Rahugana, or he possessed 
with the spirit of Rahu. Rahu, in the orthodox Vedic 
literature, is the god of the cresent new moon, that is the 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 120, 121. 

2 Rg. ii. 27, 1 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., 
pp. 421, 422. 

3 Frazer, Pausanias, iii. 250. 



'Of the Myth- Making Age. 187 

god in whose honour the Takka women danced, as we have 
seen (p. 179), religious dances at the beginning of each month. 
But this new-moon-god was one which marked the yearly- 
circles of the sun-god, and it is as the combined moon- 
and sun-god that he was worshipped as the god Raghu in 
Media. He is still the god Raghu in Kumaon worshipped 
as Kahu by the Dosadhs or fire-priests of Magadha, and 
he was the father of the Indian ploughing-god Rama. It 
was the Gotama priest of this god who, with Mathava, 
brought the sacred fire from the Sarasvati, that is from 
the Harahvaiti of Herat to the banks of the Sudanira 
or Gunduk * in Magadha. He there instituted the yearly 
animal sacrifice to Rahu which is still celebrated by the 
Dosadhs. 

The date of this festival of Rahu's year varies according 
to the local customs of year reckoning, and it may be held 
at the various dates current throughout India for beginning 
the year, except those of the November year of the Pleiades, 
when no animal sacrifices can be offered, the year of the 
three years' cycle beginning at the autumnal equinox, and 
the year of the summer solstice. It must be held on 
the fourth or ninth of the month, or on the day before 
the full moon, and the months in which it may take 
place are those (1) of the winter solstice, when the year of 
the sun-hen and Orion begins with the Pongol festival of 
the Madras Dravidians, and the Sohrai of the Santals ; (2) 
Phagun (February — March), the month ending with the 
vernal equinox, and that beginning the popular Hindu 
year with the new year's Huli festival held on the full 
moon of Phagun ; (3) Magh (January — February), when 
the Ooraon Munda and Santal year begins; (4) Baisakh 
(April — May), as the New Year's feast of the Gond year. 

At it pigs, a ram, wheaten flour, and rice milk [khir) 
are offered, and intoxicating drinks are consumed by the 
worshippers. After the sacrifice, the Bhukut or priest who 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 4, I, 14—17 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 105—106. 



1 88 History and Chronology 

has been consecrated by sleeping the night before the 
festival on a bed of Kusha grass (Poa cynosuroides), walks 
fasting, after worshipping Rahu, through the sacred fire, 
and then mounts a platform, from which he distributes 
Tulsi leaves to heal diseases, and flowers to cure barrenness 
in women. It is after this that the orgies of the feast 
begin ?. 

The gods of these Dosadhs, the triune embodiment of 
Rahu, otherwise called Bhim-Sen, are (i) Goraya, the 
boundary-god, and his two wives, Bundi the forest (bun) 
mother, and Sokha the witch-mother, the Akkadian wet- 
god Sakh, the first form of Istar ; and this triad of the year 
trident is worshipped by almost all the lower castes in 
Maghada (BeJiar), and by the women of the dominant 
tribe of the Babhans, to which almost all the great terri- 
torial chiefs belong 2 . 

There are no images in the shrines of these gods who 
manifest the various aspects of the creator shown in the 
changing seasons of the year ruled by the supreme maker 
of time, who in Asia Minor divided the year into the 
three seasons of the sowing, growing, and ripening mother- 
goddesses. 

It was the worshippers of this god Ra or Raghu who made 
the pig the sacred animal of Asia Minor and ancient Greece, 
whose blood was used as a baptismal bath to cleanse the 
guilty from sin. He was worshipped in Babylonia and India 
as Atar, the god of the Veclic Atharvans, the Zend Athravans, 
and was called in Babylonia " the lord of the pig." He is 
the white pig Vishnu worshipped by all Brahmins in the 
third of their daily meditations (p. 158), and the name of 
the pig-god was also given to the Assyrian Ramanu, the god 

1 See the Ritual described in full in Kisley's Tribes and Castes of Bengal, 
Dosadhs, vol. i., pp. 255, 256; also Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, 
vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 201, 203. 

2 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i. Amats, p. 18, Babhans, p. 33, 
Binds, p. 133, Dosadhs, p. 256, Kandus, p. 416, Korris, p. 504, vol. ii., 
Teles, p. 309. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 189 

(ami) Ram, the Indian Rama, the Akkadian Mermer, also 
worshipped as Matu or Martu, the god of the West Monsoon 
wind I . It was to this same god of increase, the Latin 
Mars (Martis), the Sabine Mar-mar, the Etrurian Maso, 
that two pigs were offered at the Roman Arvalia to secure 
the fertility of the soil, and it was to this totem god of the 
marrying races that a pig was offered at Etrurian weddings 2 . 
Istar, in one of her avatars, was a pig-goddess, being called 
as Lady of the Dawn Bis-bizi, a reduplication of bis or 
pes, a pig 3. Pigs were offered to the corn-mothers Demeter 
in Greece and Ceres at Rome, and the Phoenicians, Syrians, 
Egyptians, and Cyprians, who refused to eat swine's flesh 
as every-day food, ate it at the annual sacrifices to the 
father and mother of swine. The Cyprians fed the swine 
sacred to Aphrodite with figs, the sacred fruit of the phallus 
worshippers before the annual sacrifice 4 ; and in Isaiah 
lxv. 4 and lxvi. 3, 17, we read how the Jews used to eat 
swine's flesh and the mouse, the mouse-god (afxivOos) of Troy, 
Apollo Smintheus, at their religious festivals. In India 
the boar-god was the first Avatar of Krishna or Vishnu, 
and we are told in the Rigveda how this three-headed 
six-eyed boar of the year of three seasons was slain by 
Trita5, the god of the three years' cycle, described in 
Chapter V. In the Harivamsa the first enemy slain by the 
young Krishna, born as the sun-god, the eighth son of 
Vasudeva and Devaki, is the boar. This year-boar was 
the Calydonian boar of Greece slain by Meleager, and 
it was the parent-boar of the North whose head was eaten 
at their annual Yule feasts at the winter solstice. 

The year of the phallus worshippers, who changed the 
week, the unit of their year, from five into six days, was 



1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 153. 

2 Encyc. Brit., Arval Brothers, Ninth Edition, vol. ii. pp. 671, 672; Varro, 
De Re Rustica, ii. 4. 

3 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. pp. 258, note 2. 

4 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. vii. p. 122. 

5 Rg. x. 99, 6. 



190 History and Chronology 

that which immediately succeeded the Gond year, beginning 
with the month of May. This was the year of the central 
prong of the trident worshipped by the Takkas as Basuk 
or Vasuk Nag. His year, beginning with the summer 
solstice and the rains it brings, was that ruled by the god- 
king, called in the Mahabharata Uparichara, he who moves 
above, and Vasu, of the race of the Purus, king of Chedb 
the land of the birds [Chid or Chir). This is the country 
of the tribe of the Chiroos, who succeeded the Kushika 
Gonds as rulers of Central India, and whose descendants 
ruled Magadha till the last independent Chiroo chief 
Muhurta, was conquered in the sixteenth century A.D. by 
Khuwas Khan, general of the emperor Sher Shah. His 
descendant, representing this ancient royal race, still sur- 
vived as a local chieftain living at Chainpur in the Kymore 
hills, when I had charge of the Sasseram district in 1862. 
It was on these hills, called the Sakti mountains, forming 
the boundary of the Gangetic valley, south of KashI 
(Benares), that the national Chiroo god, Vasu, ruling the 
summer solstice, planted the bamboo pole as the sign of 
the national rain god, the Asherah of the Jews, and sur- 
mounted it with the lotus-garland of Shukra (I?tdra), the 
wet (safc) god who brings up the rains, and who gave Vasu 
a crystal car, the moon-chariot of the year-god circling 
the heavens I . This was the lotus growing in Central India 
in pools, whence the Narmada' (N erbitdda) and Sone rise. 
This sacred lotus was transported from India to Egypt 
with the worship of the sun-god Ra, and there the lotus- 
garland was the crown of the feather-headed staff borne 
by the measuring [men or min) goddess Min, the star Virgo. 
Min, with her staff and her lotus-garland, is portrayed in 
her oldest prehistoric statues found by Mr. Petrie in the 
lowest stage of the successive series of temples built one 
upon another on the ancient site of Coptos, lying on the 
route from Northern Egypt to the Red Sea -. 

1 Mahabharata Adi {Adivanshavatarana) Parva, lxiii. pp. 171 — 173. 

2 Petrie, History of Egypt, Prehistoric Egypt, vol. i. pp. 13, 14. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 191 

It was on the Sakti mountain at the source of the river 

Shuktimati, the Sanskrit Tamas, or the darkness, that Vasu 

became by the sun-hawk his second wife, one of the outer 

prongs of his trident, called Adrika, the rock, the father of 

the fish-born royal race of India, the descendants of her twin 

; i children the mountain -eels, called Matsya, the fish -father, 

a and Satyavati the fish-mother. The latter was, as we have 

;! seen, the mother of Vyasa, the alligator constellation, and 

the second wife of Shantanu, the ancestress of the Kauravya 

and Pandava kings I , and both came to life in the Yamuna 

or river of the twins {Yam a), the Jumna, of which the 

Tamas or Tons is a tributary. Matsya, the fish-father, 

I ruled the land of the Virata or sons of the Viru god 2 , and it 

>| was in his land that the Pandavas were concealed during 

the thirteenth year of their exile from power before their 

final contest with the Kauravyas. Uttara, the god of the 

North {uttara), the son of king Viru, was charioteer of 

Arjuna, the god of the rains of the summer solstice, when 

he went forth single-handed to conquer the Kauravyas, 

< who came to steal the Matsya cattle or cows of light 3. 

Also king Viru's daughter Uttara, the North Pole Star 

goddess, became the wife of Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna 

and Su-bhadra, the mountain-goddess, also called Durga, 

whose name means the sainted {bhadra) Su-bird 4. Uttara 

was the mother of the sun-god Parikshit, meaning the 

circling sun, slain by Taksh Nag, the winter-god of the 

Takka trident, the history of whose birth as the son of 

the blade of Kusha-grass will be told in Chapter VII. 

The kings of the early dynasty were descended from 
the eel, born from the sun-hawk, the goddess Friga of the 
Edda and Asia Minor, the Egyptian hawk-headed god- 
dess Hathor, depicted on the walls of the temple of the 

1 Mahabharata Adi {Adivanshavatarana) Parva, lxiii. pp. 174, 175. 

2 Biihler, Manu, vii. 193; S.B.E., vol. xxv. p. 247, note 3; Mahabharata 
Virata {Pandava-praveshd) Parva, vii., viii. pp. 18, 19. 

3 Mahabharata Virata {Goharana) Parva, xlvi. ff. pp. 109 ff. 

4 Mahabharata Virata ( Vaivdhikd) Parva, lxxii. pp. 182 ff. 



192 History and Chronology 

Virgin - mother at Denderah as the Pole Star goddess, 
giving birth at Midsummer to the hawk-headed sun-god 
Horus I . She was the Greek goddess Kirke, the hawk 
(/up/cos), who concealed Odusseus, the sun and star-god 
Orion, in her island Aiaia, and changed his followers into 
the swine sacred to the phallus worshippers. 

This fish-born royal line were the kings who led the 
Northern immigrants, who had introduced into India 
Northern crops, the custom of marriage and the worship 
of the household fire, and had amalgamated themselves 
with the people who ruled the land before their arrival, 
and had divided it into organised villages, provinces and 
groups of allied and confederated provinces. 

These grouped provinces were ruled by hereditary chiefs, 
and under the first organisation framed by the Northern 
conquerors, who preceded the sons of the eel, and their 
indigenous allies, the state seems to have been divided 
into three divisions, such as those still existing in the tri- 
butary Bhuya State of Gangpore. The central province, 
Avatered by the Eebe, is the appanage of the king, while 
the Eastern province of Nuggra is held by his hereditary 
prime-minister and high-priest, the Mahapatur, and the 
Western province, Hingir, by the Gharoutea or house- 
manager, who afterwards became the Sena-pati or com- 
mander-in-chief of the army (sena). These three chiefs 
represent the hereditary leaders of the Bhuya or earth 
{blmni) clan, formed by a union of the Northern immigrants 
with their Southern predecessors. This model is that 
followed in all the states of the ancient kingdom of 
Jambu-dvlpa, for in Chutia Nagpur, Pachete, Sirgoojya, 
Chuttisgurh, and the ancient kingdom of Magadha, the 
central province is always held by the king, and those 
surrounding it by his subordinate chieftains, and the na- 
tionality of these chieftains gives us a most reliable clue 
to the ancient history of India. 

1 Marsham Adams, The Book of the Master, chap, vi., The Temple of the 
Virgin-Mother, pp. 67 — 71. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 193 

Thus, if we take as illustrative instances of national history 
thus told, the kingdoms of Chutia Nagpur, Sirgoojya and 
Chuttisgurh, we find that in the first the village and provin- 
cial organisation is that of the Ooraons, but with them are 
intermixed their predecessors the Mundas, whose villages are 
interspersed among those of the Ooraons in the royal central 
province of Kokhra, which has been formed by amalga- 
mating a large number of Munda Parhas, which still survive 
in local geography, and each of which retains its distinc- 
tive flag. The border provinces to the North and East 
are held chiefly by Munda chiefs, but there are some 
governed by Rautia Kaurs, while the Ramgurh or Hazari- 
bagh district to the North, the hereditary appanage of 
the Commander-in-chief, is ruled by a Kharwar Raja. 

In Sirgoojya and Jushpore, which once formed part 
of Sirgoojya, the primitive element is supplied by the 
Korwas, of the Munda stock, and next above them in the 
social scale are the Gonds. The hereditary prime minister 
holding the central province of Pilka is a Gond, and so is 
the chief of Ramkola, the Northern province, the appan- 
age of the Commander - in - chief. The Southern frontier 
province of Oodeypore belonged to the Kaurs before it 
came into the hands of a younger branch of the family 
of the Sirgoojya Raja, and the Kaurs also hold frontier 
provinces in Jushpore, and the family of the present Raja, 
though they now call themselves Rajputs, were originally 
Kaurs, for they obtained possession of the governments 
on the marriage of the ancestor of the present Raja with 
the daughter of the Kaur Raja, whose ancestors had taken 
the place of the original Gond chief. 

Chuttisgurh, like Sirgoojya adjoining it, was originally a 
Gond kingdom, but the primitive inhabitants were not 
Korwas but Marya Gonds intermixed with Mons to form 
the race of Souris, Suari or Sus, the original sons of the 
bird Khu, with primitive Finn elements. They have left the 
traces of their presence iu the name of the province of 
Belaspore, which is called after the god Bel, the sun and 

O 



194 History and Chronology 

fire-god of the Souris *, a name which marks their Akkadian 
descent. Raipur, the second capital of Chuttisgurh, and once 
the central royal province, points to the rule of the Raj Gonds, 
worshippers of Rai or Ragh, and marks the connection of 
the Gond-Kaur dynasty of the Haihaya or Haiobunsi kings 
of Central India with the sun-god Rahu or Raghu. In the 
vestiges of the ancient records of these kings preserved in 
the family of their hereditary Prime Ministers we find that 
the dominions of the Haihaya, who were finally dethroned 
by the Mahrathas in 1750 A.D., extended in 1560 A.D. over 
a large expanse of country. In the lists of the royal revenues 
of Luchmun Sen, who was then ruler of Chuttisgurh, his 
kingdom included not only Chuttisgurh but also the adjoin- 
ing territories of Sirgoojya, Chutia Nagpur, Sumbulpore, 
Kharond and Bustar 2 , covering a greater area than the 
whole of France, and this was then stated to be much less 
than the Haihayas originally ruled as Lords paramount, not 
only of Jambu-dwipa or Central, but also of Northern India. 
That the Hai-hayas became ultimately Kaurs through the 
marriage of a Kaur prince with a Raj Gond princess is 
proved by the great influence exercised by the Kaurs in 
Chuttisgurh, and the large estates held by them ; among 
these are the frontier estates to the North and East of the 
province. 

We can, in the ruling tribes of this extensive tract, trace 
the history of the country from the primitive times when 
it was peopled by the Marya or tree (marom) Gonds, the 
earliest Dravidian founders of villages, and the Korwas, the 
aboriginal Mons from the North-east. They were succeeded 
by the Ugro-Finn tribes, who introduced sorcery and witch- 
craft, and by the Bhils or men of the bow. Their union 
formed the Souris, Bhuyas, Mundas and Gonds. The last 
covered the country with villages, each ruled by its head- 

1 The Souris call the sun Bel. 

2 See list of ancient Haihaibunsi provinces and their revenues in Hewitt, 
Report of the Land Revenue Settlements of the Cluittisgurh Division, ss. 55, 56, 
pp. 16, 17. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 195 

man and his four assistants, making the village Panchayut 
or council of five, and separated from its neighbours by the 
boundaries guarded by the boundary-snake-god Goraya and 
his priests the Goraits. They were succeeded by the Khar- 
wars or sons of the eel-god, and they again by the Kaurs or 
Kauravyas, who extended their rule over the whole country, 
and who, by their pre-eminent agricultural aptitude, made 
it populous and prosperous. They made water reservoirs 
in almost every village in the plateau of Chuttisgurh, and 
everywhere where the Kaurs have been left in undisturbed 
possession of their ancestral lands you find the people more 
thriving and well-to-do than in any of the neighbouring 
properties, except those peopled by their very near con- 
geners the Kurmis. Both the Kaurs and Kurmis call them- 
selves the sons of the mango-tree, for in both clans husbands 
are first married to a mango tree I . 

This descent from the mango-tree marks their identity 
with the race of the Magadha kings, represented by Jara- 
sandha, the grandson of Vasu, the central prong of the 
divine trident. He was son of Vrihadratha, who married 
the twin daughters of the King of Kashi, and as the story 
is clearly a variant of the marriage of Vichitra Virya, the 
reputed father of the Kauravyas and Pandavas, they were 
the two national mothers Ambika and Ambalika, who were, 
as we have seen, the Pole Star in Cygnus, and the stars 
of the Great Bear. They, in the Jarasandha form of the 
story, had only one son between them, who was conceived 
from the mango given to the two queens by the national 
priest Chandra-Kushika, the moon-god (Chandra) of the 
Kushikas. Each queen bore half a son, and the two parts 
were united together by an old woman, Jara, old age, to 
form the king Jarasandha, the union (sandhi) by lapse of 
time (faro) 2 . Hence he was the uniter of the Northern and 



1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Rautias, vol. ii. p. 201, Kurmis, 
vol. i. p. 504. 

2 Mahabharata Sabha (Rdjasuya-ramb/ia) Parva, xvii. pp. 54, 55- 

O 2 



196 History and Chronology 

Southern stocks forming the confederacy of the Kushikas or 
Kauravyas. He was a worshipper of the three-eyed trident- 
bearing-god Shiva, to whom he offered human sacrifices ; 
and he and his generals, Kansa or Hansa, the moon-goose 
(kans or kans), also called Kushika and Dimvaka, he of the 
two tongues (vakd), also called Chitrasena, or he of the army 
(send) of divers colours (chitra), had conquered all Nor- 
thern India before he was slain by the Pandava Bhima and 
Krishna x , 

This story tells of the age when the whole of Northern 
and Central India was ruled by Kaur or Haihaya kings, 
who were said in the Vishnu Purana to have formerly ruled 
Ayodhya (Otide), and the relics of this ruling race still 
survive in Ghazipur, where the Raja of Huldi is a Haiobunsi. 
The remembrance of their rule is recorded in the ancient 
name Ahi-kshetra, the land of the Ahis or snakes, given to 
Northern Panchala in the Mahabharata before the con- 
secration of the later sacred land of Kuru-kshetra, between 
the Sarasvati and Drishadvati 2 . This was the land ruled 
by Drona, the tree-trunk, the original mother-tree of the 
primitive races, and this name of the land of the snake 
given to the original Haihaya territory extending from the 
Himalayas to the Godaveri, survives in the original ver- 
nacular form, of which Ahikshetra is a Sanskrit translation, 
in the Gond names of Nagpur and Chutia Nagpur given 
to the land of Central India, ruled by the Nag-bunsi or 
Haihaya kings. It was the Kaur immigrants from the North 
who changed the name of the land of the Naga snakes 
into that of the Kaurs or Kurus, and the Kaurs of Central 
India who retain the old customs and ritual of their fathers 
are still like their ancestors in the neolithic age, for they 
bury their dead, perform their religious ceremonies by their 
own tribal priests ; eat beef, pork and fowls without any 
scruple ; and drink fermented and spirituous liquors. They 

1 Mahabharata Sabha {Rajasnya-rambha) Parva, xiv. pp. 46, 47, xix. p. 60, 
Sabha {Jarasaivdha-badhd) Parva, xxii. p. 68. 

2 Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, clx. p. 413, 



of the Myth-Making Age. 1 97 

show their Northern descent by their reverence for the 
Great Bear constellation, which they call that of the Seven 
Sisters, to whom a shrine is erected in every village near 
that of Goraya, the boundary-god I . 

The very great antiquity of the legendary history of their 
rule, and that of their king Jarasandha, is marked by the 
date of the latter's death. He was killed as the year-god 
of a dying epoch, and the year which he ruled was one 
reckoned, not like the years ruled by Orion and the sun- 
bird, by the solstices, but on the basis of the oldest Pleiades 
year beginning in November. For the contest between 
Bhima, the son of Maroti, the tree-ape-god, and Jarasandha 
began with the first lunar day, that is, with the new moon 
of Khartik (October— November), and lasted through the 
whole of the light fortnight of the month, as it was not till 
the night of the 14th, that is on the fifteenth night of the 
month, that Jarasandha was slain as the year-god of the 
year of the Karanas, divided into twelve months of twenty- 
nine days each 2 . It was not till the death of Jarasandha, 
the year-god of the year of the mango-tree-mother, that 
Krishna, the new year-god of the antelope race, and his 
year-sun-bird Gadura, the flying-bull (gud) of light, the 
Hebrew and Assyrian Kerub, the flying-bull, took possession 
of his chariot. This was the crystal year-car of Vasu or 
Vasuki3 ? the god of the summer solstice, who had planted 
upon the Sakti mountains the bamboo-pole surmounted with 
the lotus-garland as the sign of the national rain-pole, the 
Asherah of the Northern immigrants who worshipped the 
household fire. They had become the Kauravya or Kaur 
sons of the tortoise (kur), and had established all over 
Northern India the rule of the Kaur or Kurmi dynasty, 
which is still remembered in local Central Indian tradition as 



1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii., Rautias, p. 204^ vol. i., Kaurs, 
pp. 435, 436 ; Hewitt, Report on the Land Revenue Settlement of Chuttisgurh, 
Kaurs, s. 115, 116, p. 35. 

2 Mahabharata Sabha ( fardsandha-badha) Parva, xxiii., xxiv. pp. 7 2 > 73- 

3 Ibid., xxiv. pp. 75, 76. 



198 History and Chronology 

the original imperial power, and the remains of their moun- 
tain capital still survive in the hill jungles of Southern 
Sirgoojya. 

These Kaur-kurmi kings were followers, like their present 
descendants, of Kabir, originally the great ape-god, and were 
descended from this god in his avatar of the Great Potter, 
who made the earth revolve as the potter's wheel. Their 
year is that commemorated in the legend of the churning 
of Vasuki, with the revolving Mount Mandara as the dasher 
of his churn. This, the mother-mountain of the Indian 
Kushikas, is the hill Parisnath, lord (ndth) of the traders 
{Paris), on the Burrakur in the east of Chutia Nagpur. It 
is the sacred Eastern mountain of the Jains, whose first 
Tlrthakara was Rishabha, the bull of Koshala or of the 
Kushikas, born in the dark fortnight of Ashadha (June — 
July), that is at the summer solstice. He was the son of 
Maru-devi, the tree-mountain-goddess, and of Nabhi, the 
navel, the central turner of the earth *. In this birth-story 
as told in the Mahabharata, the god churned from the ocean 
by the potter Vasuki is not the bull, but Ucchai-shravas, the 
horse with long ears, that is, the ass, and the mother who 
bore him was the snake-god Shesh Nag or Ananta, the 
Gond Sek Nag, who had been deposed by Vasuki, and 
placed below the earth as the ocean-snake guarding the 
foundations of the mother-mountain 2 . This ass-son of the 
ocean-mother is the three-legged ass of the Bundahish with 
six eyes and nine mouths, the six and nine days of the week 
of this and the succeeding cycle epoch, and one horn, the 
gnomon pillar. It made all women pregnant, and was the 
chief assistant of Tishtrya [Siritts) in bringing up the rains 
of the summer solstice from the ocean 3. It was born as the 
ruler of the next epoch of time measurement, when it was 
divided into cycles of three years. In this age India was 

1 Jacobi, faina Sutras Kalpa Sutra ; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 281. 

2 Mahabharata Adi {Astika) Parva, xvii., xviii., xxxv., xxxvi. pp. 78—81, 
113— 116. 

3 West, Bundahish, xix. 1, 11 ; S.B.E., vol. v. pp. 67 — 69. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 1 99 

divided, according to the early geography of the country 
sketched in the Mahabharata, into a number of federated 
states forming larger aggregates, called the kingdoms of 
Anga (Magadha and the North-east), Vanga (Bengal and 
Orissa), Kalinga (the Dravidia of the South), Pundra (the 
North Centre and South-west), and Shamba (the North-west), 
the land of the Kurus, sons of the javelin {Shamba), the 
Gond symbol of the phallic-god, encased in the female 
bamboo and coated with Kusha grass, which had been the 
Shelah or spear of the Jews. 

These five divisions of ancient India are called in the 
Mahabharata the sons of the blind-god Dirghatamas, the 
long (dirgka) darkness (Jamas), the sun-gnomon stone, and 
the river Tamas, mother of the eel-born Haihaya kings ; 
and their mother was Su-deshna, the mother of the land 
(desh) of the bird {Sti), wife of Vali, the revolving (vri) 
earth l , the Pole Star mother Tara, who married, as we have 
seen in the Rama story, Su-griva the ape, after the death 
of Vali. 

1 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, civ. p. 316. 



BOOK II. 
THE AGE OF LUNAR-SOLAR WORSHIP. 



CHAPTER V. 

The epoch of the three-years cycle and of 
the nine-days week. 

THE birth of the three-legged ass as ruler of time opens 
the history of a totally new conception of time measure- 
ment. The years of the Pleiades, the sun-bird, Canopus and 
Orion, and the deer-sun, those reckoned by the primitive 
agricultural and hunting races, were in this epoch superseded 
by a division of time devised by the pastoral cattle breeders, 
who became the ruling powers in those regions bordering on 
the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, which had hitherto 
been governed by the matriarchal farmers and the Basque 
patriarchists, who were born from the union of the matriar- 
chal Dravidians with the hunting races of the North. These 
feeders of flocks and herds were more interested in com- 
puting the periods of gestation of the animals which they 
tended than in the succession of the seasons of the sowing, 
growing and ripening of crops. The leading herdsmen were 
the tribes called in India Koi-kopal or mountain shepherds, 
who were, as we are told in the Song of Lingal, the directors 
of the Kushika and Trigarta Confederacies. They had now 
come down from the mountains, and grazed their cattle 
in the river valleys, and called the cow and bull their 
totem parents. Their year was that measured by ten lunar 
months, the period of gestation of the cow-mother, but 
as this period did not cover the circle of the seasons accord- 
ing to which the national agricultural festivals were arranged, 



History and Chronology of the Myth- Making Age. 201 

they were obliged, in order to prevent the confusion that 
would ensue from the clashing of their tribal calendar with 
that of the confederacy they ruled, to devise a system of 
time reckoning which would provide for the harmonious 
working of the two systems. 

But in order to understand their method of year measure- 
ment thoroughly it is necessary to examine their national 
history. They, as worshippers of the household fire, the 
descendants of the Bru-ges of Thrace, who became the 
Indian Bhri-gu, were originally the people called in Asia 
Minor by the Turanian Finns, who changed the Aryan 
bh into ph, the Phrygians or sons of fire {pkur), born of the 
union of the Indian farmers with the Northern hunters and 
the North-eastern Finns. Their legendary father-king was 
Midas, which was apparently a name assumed on their 
succession by all the kings of Phrygia, just as all Egyptian 
kings were called Pharaoh. Each king, as he succeeded 
to power, became the reputed son of the cave-goddess 
Cybele and of her High-Priest, that is of the fire-gods, 
the fire-mother, the diorite stone which represented the 
goddess in her most sacred shrine at Pessinus, and the god 
of the hammer, who drew fire from it, the Northern smith, 
the Thor of the Edda, the wielder of Mjolnir, whose car 
was drawn by goats. This father-king, continually repro- 
duced in his successive descendants, was reputed to have 
had asses ears, and his subjects, the Satyrs, were said to 
have goat's or asses ears and goat's or asses feet and tails. 
In short, they were the sons of the mountain-goat, who 
subsequently became the sons of the wild ass of Syria, 
on which Silenus, their god, descended from the ape-father 
of India, rode. 

This historical story of the year-king with asses or horse's 
ears, belonging apparently to Asia Minor, the land of the 
ass, is repeated in the Welsh and Irish stories of March ab 
Meirchion and Labraid Lore with the swift hand or the 
sword. March is the Brythonic horse who was in Goidelic 
the ass, and the king of Galatia, the Celtic province of Asia 



202 History and Chronology 

Minor. Both killed every barber who shaved them and 
found out the secret of their ears. This horse or ass-king 
was the Indian Ashva, the horse or ass of Indra, the rain- 
god called Ucchai-shravas with the long ears, and was in 
Celtic mythology that given by Midir, the king of the 
lower world, to Rib, and by Mac Oc to Eochaid, the sun-god, 
when they had killed the horses of Rib and Eochaid after 
they escaped with their father's second wife, Ebliu, who was 
in love with Eochaid. This horse was the sun-horse who 
made with his hoofs a well, over which Eochaid built 
a house, which was submerged by the water of the well 
which filled Lough Neagh when the woman-priestess in 
charge of the holy well forgot to cover it. We shall see the 
importance of this story when I treat of the well of Hippo- 
crene, made by the hoofs of Pegasus, the horse of Belle- 
rophon or Baal Raphon, the sun-physician. March was 
king of the Fomori, or men beneath (fo) the sea (muir), and 
his swine, the holy animals of the Phrygians or Bhrigu, 
were guarded by Drystan, the Pictic Drostan, who seems 
to be a tree-god of the Druid sons of a tree (dru). He was 
induced to swear fealty to Arthur, or Airem, the ploughing 
(dr) sun-god, by Gwalch-mei, the Hawk of May. In the spot 
where March buried those who shaved him reeds grew, and 
when a bard cut a pipe from these reeds the only music 
they could play was " March has horse's ears."' 

A similar incident is recorded in the story of Labraid 
Lore, who was leader of the Fir Domnann and Gailioin, the 
men of the Gai or sun-spear, the Dubgaill or Black Strangers, 
who were allies of the Fomori, and came to aid them in 
battle. Liban, the Welsh Llion, called Muirgen the sea- 
born, was his wife, and he persuaded Cuchulainn the sun- 
god, to live for a month with Fand Liban's sister, who 
shared with her the rule of the year, and also to aid the 
Fomori as the king of the Southern sun beneath the sea. 
Labraid was shaved by a widow's son, whom he did not slay, 
but who fell ill from the possession of the secret of his ears. 
A druid cured him by telling him to turn sun-wise and tell 



* of the Myth-Making Age. 203 

his secret to the first tree on the right-hand side. This was 
a willow, the parent-tree of the Iberian sons of the rivers, 
and the harps made from it would only play " Labraid has 
horse's ears I ." The wide diffusion of this story with the 
accompanying changes of Midir's, Midas's and Tishtrya's 
ass 2 into the sun-horse of Eochaid and Indra, the sun-gods, 
show it to be a relic of ancient history universally accepted 
as recording the substitution of the sun-ass for the sun-bird, 
and the sun-horse for the sun-ass. 

These sons of the sun-ass were the Minyan or measuring 
(mm) race, equally skilled as agriculturists and herdsmen, 
who in Greece made the subterranean channels draining the 
lake Copais of its superfluous waters. In Arabia they built 
the great Minyan reservoir of Ma'arib, and in India made 
the village tanks and the large lake reservoirs of Central 
and Southern India, which survive as relics of Kurmi rule, 
such as that of Nowagaon in the Bhundara district of the 
Central Provinces, seventeen miles round. As sons of the 
mother-tree and of the Indian agricultural races, they began 
their day and year in the evening, and reckoned their day and 
night from the time of the setting of the equatorial sun of 
their Dravidian ancestors. In northern countries this could 
only be made to coincide with actual sunset at the equinoxes, 
and hence they made their year begin with the autumnal 
equinox. This gave them the sunset time they sought for 
at a period of the year very near the beginning of the 
original Pleiades year, opening with the Thesmophoria of 
October — November. From this starting-point they devised 
a time unit reconciling in a three-years cyle of forty sidereal 
months, divided into four periods each of ten months, the 
gestational and seasonal measures of the year. 



1 Rhys, Celtic Folklore, vol. i. pp. 231, 233, vol. ii. pp. 435 — 437, 4S0, 499, 
572 — 574; Ibid., The Arthurian Legend, pp. 356, 357, 378 — 380; Ibid., 
Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. v. p. 460—463, Lect. vi. p. 589, note I, 591. 

2 In the Bundahish the bringer up of the rains of Tishtrya at the summer 
solstice is the same ass who was in India Ucchai-shravas, the long-eared horse 
of India. West, Bundahish, xix. 1 — 11 ; S.B.E., vol. v. pp. 67—69. 



204 History and Chronology 

The autumnal equinox was celebrated as the birthday 
of the sun-god conceived at the winter solstice, when the 
deer-sun-year began. The infant sun of Syria, where the 
conception apparently first received official sanction, was 
the sun-god born of the cypress-tree, the Adonis Tammuz 
or Dumu-zi of Antioch, whose birth was there celebrated 
at the autumnal equinox by the finding of the Gardens of 
Adonis (ASdoviSos k^ttou), the boxes or square jars of fennel, 
lettuce, wheat and barley, which had been sown and hidden 
by the women who mourned the death of the year-god, and 
brought his new-born successor to life in the sprouting crops 
produced when the first week measuring the year was ended. 
These boxes were the Drona, the hollowed tree-trunk, from 
which the divine seed sprouted in the Indian land of Ahi- 
kshetra, the Sanskrit form of the Gond Nagpur or country 
of the Nagas, in which Drona was king, the Drona, which 
in the Soma ritual was worshipped as the Supreme god 
Prajapati {Orion'), called in the Brahmanas Ka Who? and 
invoked in Rg. x. 121, under that name, as the "Creator 
of heaven and earth and all living things, who is born from 
the Golden Womb I ." This land of the holy tree-trunk was 
the Northern Indian land of the Gangetic Doab, the country 
of the people first called Panchalas, or men of the five-days 
week, and who afterwards took the name of Srinjaya or men 
of the sickle (srini), when their union with immigrants from 
Asia Minor had made them members of the confederacy 
of the corn-growing races who introduced millets, barley and 
wheat. This sickle was the instrument with which they cut 
their corn crops, and also the symbol of the crescent-moon, 
the father-god of the cycle-year, the Harpe of the Greek 
year-god Kronos, and that with which the Assyrian god 
Bel Merodach or Marduk, the calf, slew Tiamut, the mother- 
goddess of the former era. 

1 Eggeling, Sat. £rak. } iv. 5, 5, 11, iv. 5, 6, 4; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 
408, 410. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 205 

A. Birth of the sun-god dated by Zodiacal stars. 

They began their cycle with the birth of the sun-god at 
the first new moon following the autumnal equinox, and the 
young sun-god then born was the Ram-sun, the Hermes 
Kriophoros, the ram (icpios) bearer of the Greeks, the sun- 
gnomon pillar (epfia) represented on the Palmyrene altar 
in Rome, and on many coins and bas-reliefs as rising out 
of the mother-tree with the ram on his shoulders I . This 
ram, which, as we have seen, was sacred to Varuna, god 
of the barley, Varuna's corn 2 , became the totem parent 
of the sons of Ila, the eel-goddess, in her avatar as the 
sheep-mother Eda of the Madras Kurumbas, and who finally 
became the cow-mother of the sons of Ida raised from the 
flood by Manu by the offering of clarified butter, sour milk, 
whey and curds, and who was claimed at her birth by Mitra- 
Varuna, in whose theology she as the sheep-mother had been 
a mother-goddess. But in her new birth she refused their 
claim, and acknowledged Manu, the measurer, as her father 3. 

This sun, born at the autumnal equinox, when the Jewish 
year opened with blasts from ram's horns also began, begot 
at his birth the sun of the divine seed, who was to be born at 
the summer solstice ending the ten lunar months of gestation. 
The sun of this new birth then begot the sun-god to be born 
at the vernal equinox, who was the parent of the sun-god 
of the winter solstice, whose offspring closed the three-years 
cycle at his birth at the autumnal equinox. The parent- 
father of this cyclic succession of equinoctial and solstitial 
sun-gods was the crescent-moon, and the months were not 
those of Orion's year of twenty-nine days each, but were 
measured by the sidereal star circle, represented by the 
twenty-seven Hindu Nakshatra or Nagkshetra, the fields 
(kshethra) of the Nags or beacon stars, at which the moon 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. pp. 87 — 91 ; Goblet d'Alviella, The /Migration 
of Symbols, p. 142. 

2 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 5, 2, 1 ; S.B. E., vol. xii. p. 391. 

3 Ibid., i. 8, 1, 7 — 9 j S.B.E., vol, xii. pp. 218, 219. 



206 History and Chronology 

rested during his monthly circuit of the heavens ; and the 
first of these star-stations in the list given by Brahma Gupta 
was that of the Ashvins or twin horsemen in the star 
/3 Arietis in the constellation of the Ram x . These, we are 
told in the Vishnu Dharma, represented the 27 days of the 
sidereal month 2 , that is to say the sidereal month was so 
calculated that the forty months of the cycle of 27 days each 
measured 27 x 40 or 1,080 days, the same number as that 
making up the cycle of three years of 360 days each, or 
3 x 360, 1,080 days. 

This division of time, while recognising the circuit of 
the equinoctial and solstitial sun-star round the Pole, in- 
troduced a new element in time measurement by marking 
the monthly track of the moon through the stars. And, 
together with the certain proof thus given of the introduction 
of the lunar zodiac into the measurement of the year, it 
seems probable that the beginning of a solar zodiac was 
made at the same period. For its commencement with 
the birth of the ram-sun at the autumnal equinox and 
the adoption of /3 Arietis in the Ram constellation as the 
first of the lunar stations, seems to show that the sun was 
in conjunction with the new moon in Aries at the autumnal 
equinox when this cycle-year was introduced. This being 
the case, we can make a very near approximation to the 
date when the cycle-year began. Sir N. Lockyer3 states 
that the period of the revolution of the equinox forming 
the circle of the changing Pole Stars is 24,450 years. During 
this time the sun going through the twelve signs of the 
Zodiac moves forward one sign in about 2,037 years. It 
was in /3 Arietis, at the vernal equinox, about 2000 B. C, 
and hence the period during which it had moved forward 

1 J. Burgess, C.I.E., 'Hindu Astronomy.' Journal Royal Asiatic Society, 
Oct., 1893, p. 756. This is in Akkadian Astronomy the constellation Gam, 
the curved, that of the sickle, 0/87, Arietis, with which Kronos emasculated 
Ouranos and introduced the sexless gods of this epoch. J. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 
Primitive Constellations, The Tablet of the Thirty Stars, vol. ii. pp. 71, 72. 

2 Sachau, AlberunT's India, vol. i. chap, xxxvi. p. 354. 

3 Lockyer, Elementary Lessons en Astronomy, 1888, s. 547. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 207 

from its position in the same constellation at the autumnal 
equinox was 6 x 2,037, or about 12,200 years before 2000 
B.C., or 14,200 B.C. 

This was apparently a time when no Pole Star was visible, 
for neither ancient tradition nor the star globe tells of any 
star sufficiently conspicuous to be marked as a Pole Star, 
between B Cygnus, the Pole Star about 15,000 B.C., and Vega 
in Lyra, worshipped as the Pole Star 10,000 B.C. I This 
was the age when the ruling god of time was no longer 
the Pole Star bird in Cygnus, but the Great Ape, who 
had become the Master Potter, who made the stars revolve 
as he turned the central wheel of the universe. This turning 
god was the Greek Ixion or IxiFon, the Sanskrit Akshi- 
van, the axle (aksha) god. The Northern constellation in 
which this directing god lived was the Great Bear, called 
by the Egyptians the Thigh of Set or Hapi, the ape-god, 
the rudder of the heavenly ship Ma^ent, the bringer (ma) 
or mother of progressive time 2 . Hence they looked to 
the Great Bear as the ruling constellation of the North. 

The correctness of this deduction is confirmed by the 
Hindu astronomical tradition, which makes their year of 
months begin with Push (December — January), at the winter 
solstice. This is the month of the constellation Pushya 
Cancer, and it was in this month and under this constellation 
that Rama, the son of Kush-aloya, the house (aloyd) of the 
Kushites, was proclaimed the ruler of India by his father 
Raghu, the sun-god 3. That is to say, the year of Rama 
as sun-god began, like the original Hindu year of months 
when the sun was in Cancer, at the winter solstice, that 
is about 14,200 B.C., or the same date as when it was in 
Aries at the autumnal equinox. 

1 Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, p. 128. 

2 Budge, Book of the Dead, Translation, chap. xcix. II, p. 158. 

3 Mahabharata Vana (Draupadi-harana) Parva, cclxxvi. p. 812. It was also 
in Cancer, the Great Crab, that the sun is supposed by the Malays to rest at the 
winter solstice, as I have shown on p. 174. Hence the primaeval Malay tradition 
dates itself as starting from about 14,200 B.C., when the sun was in this constella- 
tion at the winter solstice. 



208 History and Chronology 

This monumental date in Hindu astronomical history 
is again referred to in the Vedic tradition that Pushan, 
the god of the constellation Cancer, married the sun-maiden 
at the winter solstice r . 

This sun-maiden has another form, that of Sita, first the 
furrow and afterwards the moon-goddess, the wife of Rama. 
They by their union inaugurated the cycle - year of the 
Ashvins, beginning with the birth of the sun-god conceived 
at the winter solstice and born at the autumnal equinox, 
a year measured by the lunar phases of Sita, the moon- 
goddess. Again the name of Sita, the furrow ploughed 
through the sky by Rama, the sun-bull, shows that the 
givers of this name knew of a zodiacal path, or furrow, 
through the stars which he traversed in his yearly course. 
This was the yearly path of the sun and the monthly path 
of the moon, marked by the 27 stars called the Nak-shatra 
or Nag-kshethra, the fields (kskethra) of the Nags or star- 
snakes. This path was marked by Lakshman, the god of 
boundaries (laksh), the constant companion of Rama in his 
search for Sita, in the track he traced for him and the wife 
he sought for, the moon-goddess of the furrow. That this 
star track was the path of Rama is proved by his history. 
He was installed at the winter solstice as king of the year 
of the ten-headed Ravana, or ten lunar months of gesta- 
tion, from whom he was to deliver Sita. The sun was then 
in Cancer, and his ten months' journey would be completed 
under the constellation marking the close of the sun's circuit 
through a yearly path beginning in /3 Arietis at the 
autumnal equinox. This constellation is that of the 27th 
Nakshatra called Revati, said by Brahmagupta to be 



1 Rg. vi. 58, 4. The Shah-nameh of Firdousi, which is the Persian form 
of the Indian Mahabharata, but one in which the historical legends have reached 
a much later stage of decomposition than those of the Indian Epic, is founded 
on the much earlier histories of the Zendavesta and Bundahish. It begins 
with the reign of Kaioumors, the Persian Rama, who is said to have come 
to the throne when the sun entered Aries, but it does not state the time of 
the year when this happened. J. Mohl, Le Livre des jRois, p. iS. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 209 

the star £ Piscium, which was then the fish-star-mother, 
the Akkadian fish-goddess Nana, the Phoenician Tirhatha, 
who was delivered of her son, the Ram-sun-god, at the 
autumnal equinox. Hence this year beginning with the 
sun in Aries ended with the sun passing from Pisces into 
Aries at the autumnal equinox. This is confirmed by the 
Nakshatras, for the 25th and 26th Nakshatras are Purva 
and Uttara Bhadrapada, those of the month Bhadrapada 
(August — Sepember) closing with the autumnal equinox- 
That this constellation Revati marked the close of the 
Hindu Nakshatra year is also conclusively proved by the 
Vedic hymn x. 19 r addressed to Revat. In Stanzas 1 and 
2 she is called on to be still, and not carry away further 
the cows of light, but to allow them to return ; and in 
Stanzas 6 and 8 she is called the Nivartana or star which 
makes the cows return, that is, which makes them, when 
they have ended their annual circuit, begin again their 
appointed round along the path of the Nakshatra stars, 
still used by all Hindus as lunar and solar Zodiacs. 

This new reckoning of time, starting from the place of 
the sun at the autumnal equinox and winter solstice, ignored 
the old Pole Star worship of the days when the Pole Stars in 
Kepheus and Cygnus were visible* and introduced the con- 
ception of the sun-mother, enclosed in the tower of the three- 
years cycle, the labyrinthine castle of the ten-headed Ra- 
vana in Ceylon, in which Sita was confined, and Perseus 
and the Celtic sun-god Lug were born. The history of 
Perseus and his marriage with Andromeda, the Phoenician 
Adamath, the red -earth daughter of Kassiopaea, Kassia- 
peaer (the beautiful, Heb. peacr), wife of Zeus Kasios, and 
the equivalent of Eurynome (Sem. Erebh-noema), the beauti- 
ful West (ereb), points to a history based on the worship of 
the Pole Star Kepheus, husband of Kassiopaea, transformed 
to a worship of the sun-star, and its attendant constella- 
tions Kassiopsea, Perseus and Andromeda, outside the Polar 
circle. 

' Ludwig, Rigveda, No. 185, vol. i. pp. 191, 192. 
P 



210 History and Chronology 

Each of the forty months of 27 days, forming the cycle- 
year of this epoch, was divided into three weeks of nine 
days, which appear in Vedic , mythology as the Navagva 
Angiras, the nine priests of the burnt (anga) offering, and 
who are represented in Rg. x. 61, 10, II, as guarding the 
seed whence the god engendered by the union of Prajapati 
with his daughter RohinI was to be born. This mother- 
goddess was first the doe-mother, the star Aldebaran, and 
afterwards became the red dawn-cow of Rg. viii. 90, 13, 
the mother of the Kushikas. Her son was, as we have 
seen on p. 90, the god called in Rg. x. 61, 18, Nabhl- 
nedeshtha, the nearest to the navel, and the central fire on 
the altar. These nine Angiras were the guardians of the 
cows of light kept by the Panis or traders when Sarama, 
the bitch of the gods, was sent to find them x . Also their 
intimate connection as reckoners of time with the year 
measurements of the cycle-year of gestation is distinctly 
proved in Rg. v. 45, 7, 8, where they are said to have sung 
for ten months when Sarama found the cows they guarded, 
while the necessity of their guidance to those who would 
traverse the wilds of time to find the cows of light is proved in 
Rg. iii. 39, 4, where Indra is said to have taken the Navagvas 
to show him the way to these cows who lay in darkness. 

This year with its nine-day weeks also seems to be referred 
to in Rg. x. 49, 6, where Indra relates among his other exploits 
his destruction of Brihad-ratha, the year-god, with the chariot 
irathd) of Brihati, with its nine (nava) dwellings (vastva). 
Brihati was, as I have shown on pp. 69, 70, the goddess of the 
original year measured by five-day weeks, who with Rathan- 
tara ruled the seventy-two weeks of the year. In this 
passage she still remains the goddess of the year-weeks, 
which had become weeks of nine days or dwellings, and 
not of five days. This ancient week of nine days still 
survives in the Great Bengal Festival of the Durga-puja, 
called also Nava-ratra, the nine nights, celebrating the 

1 Rg. x. 108, S, 10. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 2 1 1 

victory of Durga the mountain-goddess over the buffalo- 
god Mahishasur. It is to all Bengalis practically the New 
Year's Feast of the year, and is held during the first nine 
days of Ashva-yujau or Assin (September — October), that 
is at the autumnal equinox I . 

The forty months of this year are mentioned as a measure 
of time in Rg. ii. 12, n, where Indra is said to have found 
and slain the dragon Shambara called Danu, or the son 
of Danu the Pole Star god, in the fortieth (month of) autumn, 
and also in Rg. i. 126, 4, where Kakshivan, who, as we shall 
see in Chapter VI., is the year-god of the next epoch of 
the eleven-months year, is said to have in his possession 
the forty flame-coloured horses or months of Dasaratha, 
that is of the ten (dasa) chariots (ratha), or months of 
gestation of the sun-god, also called Raghu the father of 
Rama. 

The description of this forty -months year as that of 
Shambara gives us a further clue to its place in Hin.du 
Chronological history, for the name means the holder of 
the Shamba or lance. The year-god of the lance is in the 
historical record of the Mahabharata Kama, the horned 
(kereii) god, the first son of the mother of the Pandavas 
called Kunti, the lance, or Prithi, the begetting mother of 
the Parthas, a name of the Pandavas in the poem. They 
were the Parthavas or Parthians, the horsemen of Central 
Asia who fought with the lance, and bore on their banners 
the image of their parent-god Susi-Nag, the snake of the 
sons of the Shu-bird. They appear in Rg. vi. 27, 5 — 8, as 
the tribe to which Abhyavartin Chayamana belonged, who 
led the Srinjaya against the Vrishivans and Turvasu, and 
slew three hundred of them at the Hariyupiya or sacrificial 
stakes {yftpa) of Hari, that is at Mathura, the sacred shrine 
of Hari, the Hindu form of the goddess Shar, on the 
Yayavati or Jumna, called here the river of the Yavya 
or barley (yava) granaries. 

1 Monier Williams, Religions Thought and Life in India, chap. xvi. p. 431. 

P 2 



212 History and Chronology 

Karna was miraculously begotten by the sun-god when 
he touched the navel of his virgin mother I , that is, lit the 
fire on the centre of the mother altar made in the form of 
a woman, which was made the altar of burnt-offering during 
this epoch. He was born with an impenetrable coat of 
golden mail, marking the invulnerability of the sun-god 
during the term of his rule as the measurer of year time, 
and with semi-circular earrings, which marked him as the 
sun-god with the horns of the lunar crescent. 

He was born, as we are told in the Mahabharata, on the 
first day of the tenth month of the year beginning at the 
winter solstice, that is at the autumnal equinox, and was at 
his birth placed by his mother in a basket boat, the osier- 
moon-boat of the Basque sons of the rivers, and launched 
on the Ashva or Horse-river, whence the boat descended 
to the Ganges. At Champa, near the modern Bhagalpur 
and the village of Karnagurh, called after him, Radha, the 
month Vaisakha (April — May), the mid-month of the 
Pleiades year, found the infant sun in the moon-boat, and 
took him to her husband, Adhiratha, the charioteer of the 
year's chariot, who was king of Anga, the burning {anga) 
volcanic land of Monghyr and Bhagalpore, and of the 
Angiras priesthood 2 . Thence he ruled North-eastern India, 
the land of the central mountain of Mandara or Parisnath, 
not far to the west of Champa. It was Indra who beguiled 
this horned son of the Horse or Ass-river {ashva) 3 of his 



1 Mahabharata Vana {Kundala-harana) Parva, cccvi. — cccix. pp. 908 — 912. 

2 Ibid. , cccvii. p. 907; Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 177, 
178 ; Beal's Buddhist Records of the Western World, vol. ii. p. 191. In 
p. 187 the Karna legend as told by Hiouen Tsiang is given. His feet were 
covered with golden hair, and he is called in the Buddhist traditions of the 
Mahavagga Sona (the golden) Kolivira and Sona Kutikanna. The latter 
epithet means " He with the pointed ears," that is to say, he was the golden 
sun-god with the asses ears of the crescent moon. Rhys David and Oldenberg's 
Vinaya Texts, Mahavagga, v. 1, iff., v. 13, iff.; S.B.E. , vol. xvii. pp. iff. 
32, note 3. 

3 Our word ass, the Latin asinus, comes from the Sanskrit ashva, which 
meant originally an ass, the long-eared horse Ucchai-shravas of India. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 21 3 

impenetrable golden armour and earrings when Indra be- 
came, as the Pandava-god Arjuna, his son, the ruler of the 
year, who began it by bringing up the rains at the summer 
solstice. He gave Kama in exchange the lance called 
Vasavi, the bamboo lance of the god Vasu, whence the 
tribe of the Shambara took its name, and the weapon of the 
god ruling the three years' cycle, with which he pierced the 
rain-clouds. It was with this throwing lance or arrow that 
Karna was armed when he was made king of Anga by 
Duryodhana r , the generalissimo of the Kauravyas, and 
when he was the third of the five leaders Bhishma, Drona, 
Karna, Shalya and Duryodhana, who successively led the 
Kauravyas against the Pandavas. With it he struck off the 
golden crest of Arjuna before the latter slew him with the 
more powerful weapon of the new sun-god, called Afijalika 2 . 
This was the weapon of the joined hands {anjali), that of the 
diving-fish sun-god, who joins his hands like a diver when 
plunging at the sun-set of the summer solstice into the 
waters of the Southern Ocean, which are to lead him to his 
winter goal. The death of Karna marked the beginning 
of the next epoch, described in Chapter VI., when the year 
began in one of its phases at the summer solstice. 

The Zend counterpart of Karna, the horned-god of the 
Horse or Ass-river, appears, if we judge by the name, to 
be Keresaspa, the horned (keres) horse {aspa), who is said 
in the Yasnas to be son of Thrita the third, the Vedic Trita, 
elsewhere called Thraetaona, the conqueror of the three- 
headed six-eyed god Azi Dahaka, who ruled the year 
measured by six-day weeks, described in Chapter IV. But 
when we compare the mythological history of Thraetaona 
and his son and successor Keresaspa, as told in the Zenda- 
vesta, it seems certain that it was Thraetaona who was 
god of the cycle-year. He is called the Sama or Semite 3, 



1 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxxxviii. p. 406. 

2 Mahabharata Karna Parva, xc. pp. 352—364. 

3 Mill, Zendavesta, Part. Hi., Yasna, ix. 10 ; S.B.E., vol. xxxi. pp. 233, 234. 



214 History and Chronology 

and was therefore the first ruler of this especially Semite- 
year, which was that instituted by the Hittites, called in 
India Khati, the Khita of the Egyptians and Assyrians, 

This third god of the three united years, the conqueror of 
the year of six-day weeks, was accompanied on his march to 
the Rangha or Tigris, where he killed Azi Dahaka, by the 
mother-mountain-bird, called in the Aban Yasht Vafra 
Navaza, the freshly-fallen snow J . This snow-bird, the bird 
Hu Kairya, dwelling on the top of Ararat, whence the 
mother rivers of the sons of the rivers the Euphrates and 
Tigris descend to water the earth, was the bird which 
Thraetaona is said to have thrown up in the air as a vulture. 
It then flew to the Pole Star mountain, and brought down 
the mother-goddess Ardvi Sura Anahita from her mountain 
heights, as the spring-goddess of the year, the goddess who 
caused the yearly rise of the Euphrates at the vernal equinox 
when the snows melt. The bird of the freshly-fallen snow 
of the autumnal equinox was the Pole Star bird in Cygnus, 
who ruled the Northern receptacle for the waters which are 
to fall on the earth in rain. 

The age of Trita, the god of the triple year, was that 
of the nine sons of Pathana, the nine days of the cycle- 
week, and also of Hitaspa, the Hittite horse, and of Snavid- 
haka, the stone-handed-god of the gnomon-stone, who made 
the earth a wheel and made the shining sun of Gard- 
nmana, the home of light and the spirit of darkness, that 
is the day and night, carry his year chariot. That is to say, 
made the sun the god ruling the march of time. It was also 
that of the earth-tortoise fish on which Keresaspa cooked 
his food, and which ran away with him, carrying him round 
the heavens in the course of the three-years' cycle-year 
to become the god of the head of the sun-horse in the next 
epoch 2 . 

1 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Aban Yasht, 6l — 64; S.B.E. , vol. xsiii. pp. 68, 
note 3, 69. 

2 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Zamyad Yasht, 40 — 44; S.B.E. vol. xxiii. pp 
293—297. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 2 1 5 

B. The Khati or Hittites. 

The Shambara or Parthian riders and throwers of the 
javelin, who measured time by the cycle-year of forty 
months, were, and are still, a powerful tribe called the 
Yohihas or Yaudheyas, who owned the country at the 
junction of the five Punjab rivers and the ancient capital 
of Multan, a form of Malli-sthana, or the place of the Mallis. 
They are called Yaudheyas in the list of tribes said, in the 
Mahabharata, to have brought tribute to Yudishthira, the 
eldest Pandava, when he celebrated the Rajasuya sacrifice 
as ruler of India x . They are divided into three clans, which 
show by their names of Langa-vira, the worshippers of the 
Linga or Viru ; Madho-vira or Madhua, the drinkers of the 
inspiring and intoxicating honey {inadJi) drink ; and Adam- 
vira, the sons of Adam the red man, that they belong to the 
oldest races of the Northern invaders, the warrior tribes who 
marched under the banner of the Naga snake 2 . By their 
name Yaudheya they show their connection with the Yadu- 
Turvasu named in Rg. ix. 61, 2 as allies of the Shambara. 
These Yadu-Turvasu, who became, according to the Mahab- 
harata 3, Yadavas or worshippers of the full moon, the 
Hittite Ya4, and Yavanas or barley {yava) growers, are 
the descendants of the twin-sons of Devaya.nl, the second 
wife of Yayati, the son of Nahusha, the Naga snake-god, 
who succeeded Sharmishtha, the most protecting {sharman), 
the Banyan fig-tree mother of the Druhyus, Anus and 
Purus of the year of three seasons of Chapters III. and 
IV. Devayani is said in the Mahabharata to have been 
hidden in a well by Sharmishtha, the daughter of the Asura 
king Vrisha-parvan, the god of the rainy (yrislici) quarter 
{parva), that is to say she was the sun-mother hidden in the 
tower of the three-years cycle. Her father, called Kavi 



1 Mahabharata Sabha (Dyuta) Parva, Hi. p. 145. 

2 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 244 — 246. 

3 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxxv. p. 260. 

4 Conder, The Hittites and their Language, App. iv. , Sign 24, p. 218. 



216 ' History and Chronology 

Ushana or Shukra, the son of Bhrigu, was the rain-god of 
the Asuras, the sons of Diti, the second mother, and con- 
querors of the Danavas, He said, " It is I who pour rain for 
the good of creatures I ," and his names, Shukra and Ush- 
ana, the god Ush, show him not only to be the Wet-god, 
Sak or Shak, but also the rain-bird of the Finn ancestors of 
the Kushika Kabirpuntis. Ush is the Hindu form of the 
Finn-creating bird-god Uk-ko, "the great [uk) begetter," 
who dwells in the Pole Star Tahti, in the navel of heaven 2 . 
He is the chief god in the Finnish triad of Va'inamoinen, 
Ilmarinen and Ukko, and the epithet Kavi given to him 
in the Rigveda and Mahabharata, is the Zend and Sanskrit 
form of the north-god Kabir, and the Dravidian Kapi, the 
ape, applied to the Kushite kings, who are all called Kavi 
Kush. It is as the storm-bird, the slayer of the year, that 
he appears in Rg. v. 34, 2, where he is said to have given 
to Indra the weapon called, in Rg. i. 121, 12, the thunder- 
bolt, with which he slew the deer-sun {inrigci) year-god 
Orion, and this marks him as a year-god of the cycle-year 
following Orion's year of three seasons. He is also said 
to have made Agni, the fire-god, the Hotri, or pourer of 
libations of sacrifice 3, that is to say, he instituted the ritual 
of burnt-offerings which were first offered on the national 
altars in this epoch. His daughter, Devayani, mother of 
the Yadu-Turvasu, is the goddess ruling the six Devayani 
months beginning with the winter solstice, and hence her 
two sons then begotten were the gods of the cycle-year 
beginning at the autumnal equinox. The names Yayati 
and Yadu mark them as the sons of Ya, the full-moon-god 
of the Cypriotes and Hittites, that is of the Minyans or 
measurers of Asia Minora who became the sons of Manu 



1 Mahabharata Adi (Sa?nbhava) Parva, lxvi. p. 191, lxxviii. pp. 241, 243, 
lxxxiii. p. 253. 

- Kiiby, Hero of Esthonia, Introduction, p. xxvii. ; Schoefer Castren, Finnish 
Mythology, pp. 32, 33. 

3 Rg. viii. 23, 17. 

* Conder, The Hiltites and (heir Language, App. iv. p. 218, Symbol 24, 



of the Myth- Making Age. 217 

in India. These names show them to be parent-gods of the 
joined races called Kathi in India, Khatti or Khita in Assyria 
and Egypt, and Hittitcs by the Jews, whose national symbol 
is that of the two brothers joining hands x . 

They are represented on the Egyptian monuments as 
a beardless race, a characteristic which distinguishes them 
from the hairy sons of the bull. They also wear the peaked 
tiara, the Chiroo cap, and shoes turned up at the toes. This 
last sign, combined with the fact that they habitually wore 
leather shoes, connects them with the very ancient immigrant 
race of India, the beardless Chamars, who work in leather 
and tan hides, one of the earliest occupations followed by 
the pastoral races. They use for this process myrobolans, 
the name of the fruit of the Arjuna tree ( Tetminalia Belerica), 
which is one of the most important modern exports from 
India to Europe, and was doubtless also exported thence 
by the ancient trading Turvasu. The important part 
assigned to this tree, its products, and the tanners who used 
them in ancient traditional history, is proved by the his- 
torical story of Nala and DamayantI, on which the plot of 
the Mahabharata is founded. Nala, the god of the channel 
{nala), the ordinary course of nature, was wedded to Dama- 
yantI, meaning " she who is being tamed," the earth subdued 
under the civilising influences of agriculture and industry. 
They lived happily together during the spring months of 
their marriage, but with the hot weather, Pushkara the 
gambler, the scorching west winds, came and stripped the 
earth of its verdure and fruits, and drove Nala and Dama- 
yantI into the forests, where they wandered during the rainy 
season. Nala escaped to the North-east to Ayodhya, where 
he became charioteer to the king Ritu-parna, the recorder 
of the seasons (ritu), the god of the North-east Monsoon. 
He drove Ritu-parna back to the South-west with the North- 
east Monsoon in a chariot drawn by horses of the Sindhu 
or moon (Sin) breed, those measuring time in this lunar 

1 Conder, The Hittitcs and their Language, App. iv. p. 233, Symbol 161. 



2i8 History and Chronology 

epoch, to be again re-united with Damayantl. On the way 
Ritu-parna taught Nala the science of calculation and fore- 
sight, of determining the times of the seasons and the means 
of using their influences in the orderly developments of the 
valuable products yielded by the earth-mother of growing 
life. This lesson was imparted by instructing him how to 
reckon the leaves and fruits on the Arjuna (Tenuinalia 
belericd) tree, the fruits of the industry of the trading com- 
munity, who used this tree as one of the most valuable aids 
to their commerce. This tree is the representative in this 
graphic historical story of the Arjuna {the fair) god of the 
North parent of Kutsa I , the charioteer of Indra, whose 
history as High-Priest of the Varshagiras or praisers of rain, 
and the ruling Purus, I have told in Chapter IV., p. 182. 
Also of the Arjuna of the Mahabharata, the son of Indra, 
the god of the rainy season in the Pandava year, who restored 
to power the Pandavas, beggared and driven into exile, like 
Nala, by the gambler Shakuni, the storm-bird, who here takes 
the place of Pushkara in Nala's story 2 . In this story we 
read a history told in ancient cryptogramic language, of the 
great advance made in the important knowledge of the rules 
of time measurement by the trading races and the workers 
in leather, who devised the intricate rules for measuring the 
cycle-year and for providing for an accurate determination 
of the immutable laws governing the order by succession 
of the days, months and seasons of the year measured by 
the solstices and equinoxes. And if we could recover the 
ancient sources of history, the national birth-stories of these 
primitive races, we would find that the origin of the story 
of Arjuna, as told in the Mahabharata, and of Kutsa in the 
Rigveda, was told in the birth-tale of the Arjuna from the 
Myrobolan tanning-tree, as that of the birth of the Buddha 
sun-god is told in those of the birth of the sun from the 
cypress and Sal-tree sun-mother. 

1 Rg. iv. 26, I, vii. 19, 2. 

2 For the full details and interpretation of the story of Nala and Damayanti, 
see Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. , Essay ii., pp. 64 — 72. 



of the Myth- Making- Age. 219 

Further proof of the great early influence of the Chamars, 
and of the important place they occupied among the rulers 
of India, is furnished by the history of their religious creed. 
They call themselves the descendants of Rai Das, that is 
of the sun-god Rai or Raghu, and their Northern descent 
is marked in Chuttisgurh, where I know them best, by their 
fair skins and the beauty of their women. Their connection 
with the religious ceremonies of child-birth, which distin- 
guished the ritual of the cycle-year, is shown by the custom 
which has made the Chamar women the most sought-for 
midwives in India, whose presence at a birth brings luck to 
the family. They also in their tribal ritual show that their 
original year was the cycle-year of the nine-days week, by 
celebrating their Dasahara or autumn festival on the 9th of 
Assin (Ashva-yujau, September — October), that is nine days 
after the autumnal equinox, or a day before it is ended by 
other castes, who begin it on the 1st of Assin (September — 
October), the day when the Jewish year begins, and* con- 
tinue the feast to the 10th of the month I . At this New 
Year's feast they sacrifice pigs, goats, and drink spirits. 
It is also in this month that they celebrate their new year's 
feast to their dead, who are buried and not burnt. 

That these people, who are cultivators as well as workers 
in leather, belong to the group of invading barley-growers 
and traders headed by the Kaurs and Kurmis is shown by 
their marriage ceremonies, in which the wrists of the wedded 
pair are bound with mango leaves, the marriage-tree of the 
Kurmis and Kaurs ; and they also, like the Kaurs, worship 
the seven sisters, the seven stars of the Great Bear. That 
they are the sons of the red-cow-star RohinJ Aldebaran, 
and of the growers of cotton, is indicated by the custom 
of washing the feet of the bride and bridegroom with cotton 
steeped in red-lac dye. This is done by the barber who 
officiates as marriage-priest 2 . 

In Chuttisgurh, the home of ancient faiths and customs, 

1 Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, chap. xvi. p. 431. 

2 Risley, Tribes and Casta 0/ Bengal, Chamars, vol. i. pp. 176 — 1S1. 



220 History and Chronology 

the Chamars occupy a very peculiar position arising out of 
their religious tenets. They are the leaders of the Sat Nam 
sect of worshippers of the one god, the True {sat) Name 
(nam), a sect which is the rival of that of the Kabirpuntis. 
But the Sat-Nam belief is united with phallic practices from 
which the religion of the Kabirpuntis is free x , and in Eastern 
Bengal the greater number of the Chamars are followers 
of Sri Narayan, the woman -man-god, one of the forms of 
Vishnu. 

Their name for the Supreme and only god Sat Nam, the 
True Name, shows them to belong to the Semite confederacy 
of the sons of Shem, the Name, who adored the Name of God 
as that of the phallic potter, the pole-turning father, and not 
the God of the Creating Word, and they represent the earliest 
phallic form of fire-worship, not the later cult of the sexless 
fire-god represented by the unsexed male and female priests, 
the Galli of South-western Asia. 

C. The worship of sexless and bisexual gods. 
It is this latter form of worship which appears to be the 
special product of this cycle epoch. As it is the year 
of the sun-ass, the year chariot of the god ruling it is drawn 
by asses, and they draw the car of the Ashvins, the twin 
riders on horses, or rather asses (as/wa), that with three 
wheels, the three years of the cycle. They are called the 
Nasatya, that is the Na-a-satya, those who are not (no) 
untruthful (asatya), that is, who are reliable trustworthy 
recorders of time 2 . They are called in the Brahmanas the 
first Adhvaryu, or ceremonial priests of the gods 3 } and it 
is to them that the cup of the tenth month, that concluding 
the four divisions of the cycle-year, is offered at the Soma 
sacrifice 4. Also the cycle - year began in India with the 

1 Hewitt, Report on the Land Revenue Settlement of the Chuttisgurh District, 
s. no— 113, I3°— *3 6 > PP- 33. 34,47.48. 

2 Rg. i. 34, 9 ; i. 116, 2; viii. 74, 7. 

3 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 1, 2, 17; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 16. 

4 Ibid., iv. i, 5, 16 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 276. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 221 

month consecrated to them, Ashva - yujau (September — 
October). The original twins of the creed of the Kabiri 
were, as we have seen on p. 147, male and female, the fire- 
drill and fire-socket, when the fire-drill-god became the 
Great Potter. They were the male and female creators, the 
days and nights, who made the potter's wheel of the earth 
revolve by turning the tridents of the three seasons of the 
year, and raising the earth from the ocean. This symbolism 
remained dominant during the present epoch. In it the 
Ashvin twins were the hands of the gods in the fourteen 
star constellation of the Sinishumara or Alligator. These 
hands were the stars Kastor and Pollux in Gemini x , repre- 
sented in astronomical notation by the square which suc- 
ceeded the circle of the year measured by seasons. This 
square is guarded by these twin Stars, its door-posts, called 
in Akkadian Masu-Mahru, the Western twin {Kastor), and 
Masu-arku, the Eastern twin {Pollux) 2 . The door they 
guarded as the West and East stars was that looking 
Southward, like the doors of the Sabaean temples and 
Mahommedan mosques, and leading to the Northern realm 
of the Pole Star god. This was represented in the Zenda- 
vesta as the garden of God, called the Vara-Jam-kard, the rain 
(var) garden made by the twins Yima. It is the garden 
symbolised as circled by the sun-bird in the four equal 
divisions of his three years' flight round the heavens, and is 
described as an exact square, two hathras, or about two 
miles long on every side. In it was built a house of kneaded 
clay (the brick age had not yet arrived) with fires, the home 
of the household-fire of the earth, and it was stocked with 
the human products of the seeds of the most thoroughbred 
men and women, the flower of the red race, the Yaudheya 
Adam-vira, and with the best breeds of cattle, sheep, dogs, 
and birds, also with the best fruit and timber trees, and 



1 Sachau, Alberuiri's India, vol. i., chap. xxii. p. 242. 

2 R. Brown, jun., F. S.A., Researches into the Origin of Primitive Constella- 
tions, vol. i. p. 359, note on p. 338, 



222 History and Chronology 

no permanently diseased or impotent persons were admitted 
into it. It was to be divided into three districts, the three 
years of the cycle, the largest containing nine, the middle 
six, and the third three streets, the nine and six-day weeks, 
and the three years of the cycle, a division tracing the 
gradual growth of this conception of time measurement 
from the year of three seasons. It was to be sealed up 
with a golden ring, the ring of the cycle, and to be entered 
by the door to which the ring was attached J , the door with 
the stars Gemini for its door-posts. The number forty, 
the forty months of the cycle, was to be its sacred number, 
for every fortieth year each male and female couple were 
to have a male and female child, These children of the 
two sexes were born from the one-stemmed RTvas plant, 
the mother-tree, out of which they grew as one bisexual 
being which was to be the parent of future life 2 . They 
were thus the symbols of the bisexual creating sun-god born 
in the fortieth month of the cycle. The gate of this garden 
of life, the successor of the consecrated village grove, was 
called in Greece the Dokana, of which the two side-posts 
were the brother twins Kastor the pole {stor) of Ka the 
unsexed beaver, the house-builder, and Polu-deukes, the 
much (ttoXv) wetting (Sevco), the rain-father-god who brought 
the seed of life to earth. 

This square garden entered by the holy gate became 
the Templum of the Roman Augurs, the field of the parent- 
rain-bird, divided into four equal parts by the lines drawn 
North and South, and East and West from the centres of 
its four sides, to form the Greek equilateral cross of St. 
George, the cross on the back of the cycle-ass. It was this 
cross of the ploughing-god, called also in Syria El Khudr, the 
rain-god, the Greek Elias, which represented the four equal 
divisions of the cycle-year, beginning with the autumnal 
equinox. The day of the finding this cross, and its adop- 

1 Darmesteter, Zendavesta VendTdad Fargard, ii. 25 — 41 ; S.B.E., vol. iv, 
pp. 16 — 20. 

s West, Bundahish, xv. 2, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. v. p. 53. 



of the Myth- Making- Age. 223 

tion as the national sign for God, as the new year's day 
of the cycle, is recognised in the popular mythology of the 
Lebanon, where the feast of the Invention of the Cross, 
'Id El Saib, is still celebrated every year on the 14th 
September, the first day of the week, at the end of which 
the new sun-god is to be born x . 

It was in this age of the three-years cycle ruled by the 
Angiras priests of the burnt -offerings that the offering 
of roasted totem victims, afterwards consumed by the as- 
sembled tribes -folk, first began. Originally the victims 
were eaten raw, and their blood drunk, according to the 
Arab custom of eating all but human victims raw 2 , a 
custom still observed in Southern India in the worship 
of Potraj. He is the male counterpart of the stone-mother- 
goddess of fire, whose stone image is covered with vermilion, 
and who is the Indian form of the Phrygian cave-goddess 
Cybele, whose image is a fire-stone. 

The Potraj festival is a festival of the pre-Sanskrit popula- 
tion, at which Pariah priests officiate, and in which the 
Mangs, or workers in leather, play a principal part. The 
sacrifice lasts for five days, showing that it originally dated 
from the age of the five-days week, and the first animal 
slain at it is the sacred buffalo, who had been turned loose 
as a calf and allowed to roam in freedom through the village 
fields, till the day of the Dasahara festival held, as we have 
seen, by the Chamars of Bengal on the 9th of Assin 
(September — October). It is killed on the second day of 
the feast, and its head struck off, according to the universal 
Dasahara practice, with one blow. Round its body are placed 
vessels containing the cereals grown in the village, and close 
to it a heap of mixed grains with a drill-plough in the centre 
showing the festival to be one to the plough-god. The 
carcase is then cut up into little pieces, one being given 
to each cultivator to bury in his field. The blood and offal 
are collected in a large basket, over which some pots of 

1 Burton and Tyrrwhitt Drake, Unexplored Syria, vol. ii. p. 89. 

2 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Se?nites, Lect. vi. p. 210, 



224 History and Chronology 

cooked food had previously been broken, and a live kid 
is hewn in pieces and scattered over the whole by the 
Potraj priest. A Mang then takes the basket on his head 
and throws its contents right and left as an offering to 
the evil spirits, as he, followed by the other Pariahs, runs 
round the village boundaries. On the fifth day the whole 
community marches to the temple, and a lamb, concealed 
close by and found by the priest, is placed by him on 
the Potraj altar. He makes this victim, the Ram sun 
of the dying year, insensible by striking it with his 
wand of office, and after his hands have been tied 
behind his back, he rushes at it, tears open its throat 
with his teeth and eats the flesh. When it is dead he is 
lifted up, and he buries his face in a dish of the buffalo 
meat-offering given to him. This, with remains of the 
lamb, is buried beside the altar, and the slaughtering priest 
flies *. This buffalo autumnal sacrifice is one celebrated 
by the male Todas, who then eat a young male buffalo, 
though they will not touch the flesh at other times 2 , and 
this sacrifice is probably a variant of the bear feast of their 
Aino congeners, described on p. 117. We see in this festival 
the transition from the ritual of the Bhrigus, who ate the 
animals they sacrificed raw, to that of the Angiras, who 
cooked their victims, and mixed this cooked meat with 
the raw buffalo offal and blood. This is the festival of 
the autumnal equinox celebrated all over Central and 
Southern India at the Dasahara New Year's feast, held 
on the 10th of Assin (September — October), at which a 
buffalo is slain, and it answers to the Jewish Feast of Taber- 
nacles held on the 15th of Tisri (September — October). 

The radical change in the national customs accompanying 
the introduction of this new measurement of time is marked 
by the change in the date of the annual feast to the dead. 
The original feast was that which began the Pleiades year 

1 G. L. Gomme, Ethnology in Folklore, chap. ii. pp. 22—25 ; Sir W. Elliot, 
Journal Ethnological Society, N. S., i. 97 — 100. 

2 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. vii. p. 281, 



of the Myth- Making Age. 225 

with three days' mourning, of the 31st of October and the 
1st and 2nd of November. This was first altered, as we 
have seen on p. 169, by the Iranian sons of Ida, who wor- 
shipped the Fravashis, or souls of their ancestors, at the 
summer solstice, during the epoch of the year of three 
seasons and the six-days week. But this local ritual was 
not accepted in India when the pastoral barley - growing 
tribes united the Indian people in the confederacy of the 
Kushika. It was to celebrate the formation of this national 
union, beginning with the autumnal equinox, that the last 
fortnight of Bhadrapada (August — September), called the 
Pitri-paksha, was dedicated to the fathers r . This is the 
month of the blessed (bhadra) step, consecrated to the 
Pole Star goat - god, which became the month of the 
sons of the ox, when it received the name translated in 
Sanskrit as Prosthapada, the ox-footed month. The latter 
half of this month was the season of Sraddhas, or memorial 
celebrations of the sons of the cloud-goddess Shar, to whom 
the autumn called Sharad was dedicated. It was to the 
next month (September — October), called Boedromiort, the 
course of the ox, a reproduction of the Indian name of the 
previous month, that the Nekusia, or feast to the dead, was 
celebrated in Athens. The ordinary Pitriyajna or sacrifice 
was offered once a month at the New Moon, showing it 
to be a sacrifice of a year beginning with the New Moon, 
but, as in the beginning of the cycle-year, the New Moon 
of Ashva-yujau (September — October) was consecrated to 
the sun-god of the New Year. It was the last days of 
ithe departed year which were dedicated to the dead fathers 
and called the days of the Maha-pitri-yajna, or sacrifice to 
the Great Fathers. 

The fathers to whom this festival was especially con- 
secrated were the worshippers of the Pole Star, who wore 
the sacrificial cord on the right shoulder and bent their left 
knee in their circumambulations of the altar, which were 

1 Sachau, Alberuni's India, vol. ii. chap. Ixxxvi. p. 180; Monier Williams, 
Religious Thought and Life in India, chaps, xi., xvi. pp. 30S, 431. 

Q 



226 History and Chronology 

always made contrary to the course of the sun, from right 
to left 1 . They are called the Pitaro Barishadah, or the fathers 
who sat on the sheaves (bar his) of Kusha grass (Poa cyno- 
suroides). They, as we are told in the Brahmanas, were the 
first fathers to whom cooked sacrificial food was offered. 
They were men of the Neolithic stone age, who buried their 
dead, and preceded the last series of fathers recognised 
in the Brahmanas as commemorated at this Festival. These 
were the Pitaro' Gnishvattah, those " consumed by fire," 
a name proving them to belong to the Bronze Age, when the 
dead were burnt as in the Vedic ritual, and that now followed 
by all high-caste Hindus 2 . 

The predecessors of these two classes of barley-eating 
fathers were the Pitarah Somavantah, or fathers possessed 
of Soma, that is, the sons of the tree and its life- 
giving sap (soma). These first fathers were fed -at this 
festival with rice on six platters, the six days of their week. 
This rice was brought by the sacrificing priest to the north 
of the Garhapatya or circular household (GurJi) fire-altar, 
whence he took it southward and threshed it at the north of 
the Dakshina or southern fire, shaped like a crescent moon 3. 
After threshing the rice he ground it between two mill- 
stones placed on the skin, sloping to the south, of the black 
antelope, the successor of the deer-sun and the year-god 
of the Kushika, sons of the Kusha grass, the antelope's 
favourite food. He placed the cakes made of this ground 
rice, divided into six portions or platters, to the south of the 
Garhapatya 4 altar, after it had been mixed, in the ceremony 
presided over by the Aptya or water (ap) gods (the Trita 
Aptya of this epoch), with water brought by the unsexed 
Agnldhra or fire-priest, who also buttered the dough before 
it was baked by the Adhvaryu or ceremonial-priest 5, 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 4, 2, 2, ii. 6, 1, 8, ii. 6, 2 n. ; S.B.E., vol. xii. 
pp. 361, 421, 441. 2 Ibid., ii. 6, 1, 7 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 421. 

3 Ibid., The Agniyadhana, or Establishment of the Sacred Fires; S.B.E., 
vol. xii. p. 275. 4 Ibid., ii. 6, 1, 4, 8, 9 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 421, 422, 

s Ibid., i. 2, 2, 1 — 18 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 42 — 47. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 227 

The Adhvaryu, after preparing the sacrifice for the rice- 
eating fathers, began to prepare that for those- born of the 
Kusha grass. For them he prepared a new altar, differing 
from the circular Garhapatya and the semi-circular or 
crescent-shaped Dakshina altar of the earlier races. For this 
altar he built a four-sided shed south of the Dakshina fire, 
the tower of the three-years cycle, with its door to the north, 
instead of being on the south side, like the door of the 
garden of the Twins. Inside this he built the national sacri- 
ficial fire-altar of earth, made in the form of the woman 
enclosed in the tower, who was to be the mother of the 
sun-god born of the cycle-year 1 . The altar was placed 
with its sides facing the cardinal points, like the early sun- 
altar at Borsippa, near Babylon, and it was to measure a 
fathom on the west and three or more cubits from west 
to east. Also the east side was to be shorter than the west. 
The breadth was to be contracted in the middle to resemble 
a woman's waist, and it was to slope towards the east 2 . 
This altar, called the Vedi or altar of knowledge, was 
sprinkled with water by the Adhvaryu before he thatched 
it with Kusha grass. Seven sheaves or Barhis were made of 
this grass in the later ritual of the seven-days week, but 
only four for this earlier festival. With three of these the 
altar was thatched by the Adhvaryu, as the Barhis on which 
the Pitaro Barishadah sat. For this ceremony he in the 
later ritual shifted the sacrificial cord to the left shoulder, 
and laid the grass in three circuits of the altar made sun- 
wise 3. The fourth was the Prastara or rain-wand, the Zend 
Baresma, made of three united sheaves, the three years of 
the cycle, flowering shoots denoting the flowers of each 
of the three years being added to each sheaf 4. 

After the altar was thatched the priest placed the fire re- 
moved from the crescent moon-shaped Dakshina altar to the 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brak.,\\. 6, I, 10; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 422, note 3. 
- Ibid., i. 2, 5, 14 — 17 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 62—64. 

3 Ibid., i. 3, 3, 3 ; ii- 6, I, 14-15 ; vol. xii. pp. 84, note 2, 424, 425. 

4 Ibid., ii. 5, 1, 18 ; vol. xii. p. 389, note r. 

Q 2 



228 History and Chronology 

centre of the new altar, calling the fire- wood " the black 
deer living in a den," the fire of generation hidden in the 
womb of the black-antelope-altar 1 . He encircled the fire 
with the Paridhis, the enclosing mother-triangle of the cycle- 
year, made of three sticks of Palasha wood (Butea frondosd) , 
with its apex towards the south, and laid the northern stick, 
denoting the northern origin of the fathers, first 2 . Thus the 
figure of the altar was as follows — 




with the sacred triangle, the womb, impregnated with the 
fire-seed in the centre. This fire was the Agni Jatavedas, 
the Agni who knows (vedas) the secrets of birth (jata), 
which was thus invoked by the Hotri or libation-priest in 
the words of the Vedic ritual 3 : " We place thee, O Jata- 
vedas, in the place of Ida (the mountain-daughter of Manu 
and the sheep (edd) mother of the ram-sun), in the navel 
of the altar to carry our offerings." This fire was the 
sacred fire, NabhI-nedeshtha, nearest to the navel (nab hi), 
born as Vastospati, the lord (pati) of the house, the house- 
hold fire, from the union of Prajapati (Orion) with his 
daughter Rohinl Aldebaran, and transferred from this 
Garhapatya altar to the new altar, made in the form of 
a woman, when Rohinl became the red cow and the god 
born from the fire of the altar became the husband of his 
mother, kindling the fire in the navel of the altar, and the 
begetter of the successive children born of the cycle, who 
were finally to produce the perfect sun-god, rising from the 
fire to the sky. 

The offering made on this altar to the fathers who buried 
their dead was barley-grain, parched on the fire but not 
ground. This was the same food as that of the Picts, which 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, i, n, i. 3, 3, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 422, 
note 3, 84. 

3 Ibid., i. 3, 3, 13, 19 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pd. 87, 89, 90. 
3 Rg. iii. 29, 4. 



oj the Myth-Making Age. 229 

they buried for their year's consumption in subterranean 
chambers, such as those still made by ryots in Chutia 
Nagpur. It was these Picts who traced descent in the 
female line, like the Nairs of Madras, the Lycians, Cre- 
tans, Dorians, Athenians, Lemnians, Etrurians, Egyptians, 
Orchomenians, Locrians, Lesbians, Mantinaeans x , and all 
the races comprised under the names of Tursena, Tursha 
and Tyrrhenians, the rulers of the Minyan empire. They 
are called in Irish Cruithni, and in Welsh Priten or Pryden, 
meaning men of the " form or shape " of the animal-parents, 
from whom they claimed descent. They in Europe tattooed 
their tribal marks on their foreheads, and covered their 
bodies, according to Herodian, " with the figures of animals 
of all kinds," that is with those of their totem-parents. It 
was these men who gave to our islands the Welsh name 
of Yuys Pridain, the Picts' island, called by Strabo and 
Diodorus the TIperavLKaC Nriaoi, whence the name of Britain 
arose 2 . It was apparently their congeners who came to 
India as the fathers who ate parched barley, tattooed their 
bodies as the Ooraons still do, and painted on their foreheads 
the sign or Tiloka of the Naga snake, and of the trident 
of Vishnu, their sacrificial stake, a mark still worn by all 
Vishnuites, the tribal mark which the sons of Jamvavan, the 
bear, were said to bear in the Mahabharata (p. 119). 

It was this race of barley-growing sons of the cross of 
St. George, the worker (01^70?) in the earth (7*7), the plough- 
god of the three-years cycle, born from the navel-fire of 
the altar, who became in European traditional history the 
parents of the second race of the sons of the rivers, the first 
cultivators who tilled land with the plough. They were born 
from the god-kings of Lydia, Herakles, the star Orion, wor- 



1 Morgan, A7icient Society, Macmillan and Co., 1877, chap. xiv. pp. 343, 351 ; 
Bachofen, Die Mutterrecht, passim; Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh 
People, chap, ii., The Pictish Question, pp. 36 — 74. 

2 Sir H. Maxwell, A Duke of Britain, pp. 31, 393 ; Rhys and Brymnor 
Jones, The Welsh People, pp. 76, 79, note 2, 80 ; Professor Rhys, Address to 
the Anthropological Section of the British Association, Sept. 6, 1900. 



230 History and Chronology 

shipped as the sun- god 1 , and Omphale, the navel, who 
succeeded the sons of Attis the Phrygian of the Bhrigu race, 
the ape-grandfather-god Pappos 2 . They were the Hindu 
Asura, who succeeded the Danava, the Danaoi of the Greeks, 
the Turanian sons of Danu of the Zendavesta, the sons of 
Dan of the Jews. These latter were in Jewish history the 
sons of Billah, the old Pole Star mother, and Dan's sons were 
the race called Hushim and Shuham 3, the Hus and the 
Shus, the subjects of the Zend and Vedic kings Hu-shrava 
and Su-shrava, the glory of the Hus and Shus, the king 
called in the Biblical historical genealogy of Edom {the land 
of the red men), preserved in Genesis, Husham, king of the 
Temanites or Southern Arabia. He was the son of Jo-bab, 
the gate (bab) of God {Jo), the constellation Gemini, and 
grandson of Zerah, the red son of Tamar, the palm-tree 
mother and predecessor of Hadad Rimmon, the hastening 
{hadad) pomegranate, the sun-god 4. 

This widely-spread race of the Kushite Asura, the ploughers 
of the earth and the growers of corn, were the people who 
worshipped the bisexual mother-goddess, called by the 
Phoenicians Shemi-ram-ot, meaning She of the exalted 
{ram) name (Shem), a name by which one of the classes of 
officiating Levites is called in 1 Chron. xv. 18, 20. She was 
a goddess whose statues at Ashkelon on the Mediterranean 
and Mabug {Hierapolis) on the Euphrates are described by 
Diodorus Halicarnassus and Lucian. At Ashkelon, Dio- 
dorus ii. 4 says that in her temple outside the city she was 
portrayed with the crescent-moon over her head, a spear 
in her left, and a dove, the bird of marriage, on her right 
hand. Her foot was placed on the head of her fish-mother, 
the goddess Derketo. Lucian, De Dea Syria, 33, says that 
her image at Mabug stood between that of Chiun, the pillar- 
god, the gnomon-stone, and Tirhatha, meaning the cleft, 

1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. p. 472. 
• Herod, i. 7. 

3 Gen. xlvi. 23 ; Numb. xxvi. 42. 

4 Gen. xxxvi. 33 — 35. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 23 1 

the Phoenician form of the name of the fish-mother-goddess, 
changed by the Greeks into Derketo and Atergatis. 

She had a dove on her head, and was represented as a 
Hermaphrodite, half-man and half-woman, with the male 
and female attributes of the other two gods of the triad. 
She was called Semeion or Semi, and the story of her birth 
was that she was the daughter of Hadad, the sun-god of 
Damascus, who sent her to the sea to get water from thence 
to drive away the evil spirits from the springs. Her mother 
was Tirhatha, the fish-mother-goddess, depicted at Mabug 
as bearing a sceptre in one hand and a spindle, the sign 
of the spinning Pleiades, in the other. A tower-crown of 
the year-goddess, like that of Kybele and Isis, was on her 
head, which was surrounded with a halo. She wore the 
girdle of the ruling year-goddess round her waist, and she 
was a sea-goddess into whose temple-cleft or pool sea water 
was brought twice a year in sealed jars. She abandoned 
her daughter Shemiramot on the mountains, and she was 
brought up by the doves, the Pleiades, the Greek Peleiades. 
They got milk for her from the shepherds, and the shepherd 
Simmas gave her the name Shemiramot when she was 
a year old x . Thus she was a goddess born from the central 
mountain, the earth-altar encircled by the salt sea, the ocean- 
snake surrounding the mother-mountain, and she, like her 
mother, measured time. 

Her festival fairs at Mabug were held in spring and 
autumn at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and they 
were accompanied by orgiastic rites requiring the temple 
Kedesha to prostitute themselves to strangers paying the 
fixed fee into the treasury of the goddess 2 . She, the goddess 
of the doves, is called by Herodotus i. 105, Aphrodite 
Ourania, and is said to have sent the female disease upon 
the Scythians who plundered her temple at Ascalon. That 

1 Movers, Die Phouizier, vol. i. chap. xii. p. 46S ; chap. xvii. pp. 58S, 
598, 631, 632, 634. 

2 Ibid., vol. iii., Das Phcenische Alterthum, chap. vii. pp. 136, 137. vol. i 

p. 635- 



232 History and Chronology 

is to say that the establishment of her worship caused the 
ritual requiring the performance of the divine ceremonies 
by unsexed male and female priests to become universal 
throughout South-western Asia. But in India, where the 
earlier cult of the Bhrigu priests was established, this phase 
of worship only produced the one unsexed priest, the 
Agnidhra. It was he, the helper of the cooking-priest, who 
brought water and butter for making the sacrificial cake 
for the Pitarah Somavantah in the festival of the dead 
fathers described above, and who in the preparations for 
the offerings made to the Pitaro Barishadah wiped the dust 
from the three lines drawn by the Adhvaryu, either East 
or West or North and South across the altar, and laid the 
fire-logs and sacrificial sheaves by the altar with their tops 
to the South *. 

The ritual of the Galli or unsexed priests of Cybele, Istar, 
Mylitta, and all other forms of the cycle-mother-goddess, 
was that of Herakles Sandon, a form of the god Moloch, 
the master {malik). He is described in his Grecian legendary 
history as exchanging the beast skin he wore as the deer or 
lion sun-god for the flesh-coloured, transparent garment of 
his paramour Omphale, the navel. His male priests wore 
the women's garments depicted as those of Herakles on 
Lydian coins, and the women marched to the sacrifice armed 
with swords, lances and the sickle-shaped knife, the imple- 
ment used for killing the victims of Moloch worship, among 
whom they sacrificed eldest sons. This son was in Jewish 
ritual redeemed at the Passover by the lamb substituted for 
him as the sacrificed Ram-sun, but in the early Semitic 
worship these sacrifices were universally offered by all 
Semites. The lamb might be substituted for the ass, the 
sun-ass of this cycle-year, but for no other animal was a 
substitute allowed, and their necks must be broken 2 . 

The high places on which these rites were performed were 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, 1, 12; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 422, note 3, 
423, note 3. 

2 Ex. xiii. 11 — 16 ; Jer. xxxii. 35. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 233 

the consecrated hills of hilly lands, symbolising the central 
mother-mountain, and to supply these in plain countries arti- 
ficial hills were raised, which were called in South-western Asia 
the hills of Shemiramot r . The most universally celebrated 
of these artificial hills is that of Borsippa near Babylon. 
The name of this city is in Akkadian Ka-dingira, the gate 
of the Creators, translated by the Semites into Bab-ili, the 
gate of II the god. This name, which represented the 
theology of the cycle epoch of the Gate Stars Gemini, was 
substituted for the earlier title of Tintir-ki, the place of the 
tree of life, the mother-grove 2 . The hill of Borsippa, called 
by the Akkadians Tilu eilu, the illustrious mound 3, is that 
to which the seventh month of their later year, called Tul-ku, 
the holy mound or altar (September — October), was dedi- 
cated. This was the first month of the cycle-year, the 
Jewish Tisri, the Indian Ashva-yujau, the Attic Boedromion; 
and it was in the previous month, Ki-Gingir-na (August — 
September), that of the circuit of Istar the creatrix (Gingir), 
that Istar descended to the realms of Allah, the goddess 
of the Southern world, to recover the dead sun-god Dumu-zi, 
and bring him back to earth as the ram-sun-god born at the 
autumnal equinox on the top of the Holy Hill. On entering 
the abode of the sun-goddess of the South, Istar had to 
divest herself of the ornaments marking her as a lunar year- 
goddess, including the year-girdle of the Syrian Tirhatha 
and the lunar earrings of the Hindu Kama 4. 

It was on these hills that the New Year's festival of the 
Feast of Booths or Tabernacles was held. This began 
according to the Levitical Jewish law on the 15th of Tisri 
at the full moon 5, but in the epoch we are now dealing 
with, it was the New Moon feast of the cycle-year. We have 

1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 480, 4S3, chap. xiv. p. 674. 

2 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. i., chap. viii. p. 314. 

3 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. vi. p. 405. 

A Ibid., Lect. iv. pp. 221 — 227; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Con- 
stellations, vol. ii. p. 13. 
5 Levit. xxiii. 34. 



234 History and Chronology 

seen in Chapter II. p. 49, that this was originally the New 
Year's festival of the Sabaean sons of the tree, held on the 
1st of November to commemorate their descent from the 
mother-village grove, and like their feast to the dead in 
India, it was changed by the corn -growing races to the 
autumnal equinox. The festival is called by Hesychius 
Sakara, the feast of the Saka, or sons of the wet-god Sak, and 
it was in India the Saka-medha, or sacrifice of the Sakas. 
The corresponding festival held to celebrate the beginning 
of Orion's year at the winter solstice was, as we have seen 
in Chapter III. p. 96, the Rudra-Tri-ambika. The sun-god 
then conceived when the Pole Star was in Cygnus, from 
17,000 to 15,000 B.C., was the sun-god brought up from 
the nether world in August — September, to be born as the 
ruler of the cycle-year at the autumnal equinox. But this 
New Year's Hindu festival of the corn-growing races was 
also like that of the Arabians originally held in October — 
November, and this original date was retained in the Vedic 
ritual of the Brahmanas, which gives the full moon of 
Khartik (October — November) as the date of the Saka- 
medha *. But this, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 197, 
in the account of the slaying of Jarasandha, the god of 
the year of three seasons and six-day weeks, by Bhima, 
was originally held on the new moon of Khartik 2 . To 
judge by the date of the Shraddha feast to the dead held 
at the autumnal equinox to replace one originally celebrated 
in October — November, there can be but little doubt that 
when this festival received the Akkado-Semitic name of 
the Saka sacrifice, it was held with the feast to the dead 
as the New Year's festival of the barley-eating fathers. 

It was called by the Phoenicians Sakut, meaning the 
booths, the Hebrew Succoth. It was at the place called 
by this name that Jacob built his first house, and made 



1 Eggeling, Sat. Bra/t., Chaturmasiyani, or Seasonal Sacrifices, Introduction; 
S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 383. 

2 Mahabharata Sabha (/anisandka-badha) Parva, xxiii. p. 7 2 - 



of the Myth- Making Age. 235 

booths for his cattle after he crossed the parent Semite 
river Jordan 1 , the Greek Iardanos, the river-god to whom, 
according to Herod, i. 7, Omphale the Navel, the female 
form of the bisexual Herakles, was a slave. This de- 
scription marks the New Year's feast of Jacob's house-warm- 
ing at which he lit his household fires for the year, as that 
of the house-building Kushika or Hittite Khati, who built 
the three-years tower of God. 

In India it was the Bengal Durga-Puja, or Nava-ratra, 
held on the 10th day of the light half of Assin (September — 
October), the festival of the mountain-goddess Su-bhadra, 
described in the Mahabharata as that held on the Raivataka 
hill, whence Arjuna eloped with Su-bhadra 2 . This, as we 
have seen on p. 209, was the festival of Revati, the closing and 
opening festival of the year. She was the hill-eel-goddess, 
the blessed bird (Su) who, as we have seen in Chapter III. 
p. 96, succeeded the Tri-ambika mothers, and this mountain- 
goddess was, as Strabo tells us, xi. 8, pp. 431, 432, the 
Persian goddess Anahita, the Greek Anaitis, the Ardvi Sura 
Anahita of the Zendavesta, the mother-river Euphrates, sent 
down to water the earth of the sons of the Gate of God by 
the creating (kairya) bird Hu-kairya, the Zend form of 
Su-bhadra. She was the goddess Tanais of Carthage, a 
form of Danu, the Phoenician Thenet, who was, as Berosus 
tells us, also the national god of the Saka 3. The worship 
of this mountain-goddess extended from the East in India 
to the West of Europe, for we have in the hill of Avebury 
in Gloucestershire an example of the artificial hills erected 
in her honour. In this cycle-year the two festivals of the 
solstitial year held at intervals of six months in each year 
were incorporated, and to these two festivals the equinoctial 
festivals were added, and each of these festivals was the 
beginning of a fresh year of ten lunar months of gestation. 



! Gen. xxxiii. 17 ; Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. vi. pp. 4S0 — 4S5. 

2 Adi {Subhadra-Harana) Parva, sects, ccxxi.. ccxxii. pp. 603 — 607. 

3 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xvii. p. 620. 



236 History and Chronology 

Consequently the New Year's feast of the autumnal equinox 
was repeated at the summer and winter solstices and the 
vernal equinox. 

D. The festivals of the three-years cycle. 

The feast beginning the ten-months year following that 
opening at the autumnal equinox was that of the summer 
solstice. This feast at Babylon was the Saka Feast of 
Booths, commemorating the marriage of Shemiramot to 
Ninus or Nimrod, the hunter-star Orion of the year of three 
seasons. It was held on the hill of the Illustrious Mound, 
and took place, according to Berosus, on the 16th of Loos 
(June — July), and the date of the festival coincides with that 
of the setting of Orion at sunset, who was said to have been 
put in the sky by Ninus, that is to say, the Wild Hunter 
Ninus became the year-star Orion x . 

The festival lasted for five days, and was ruled by the 
bisexual-goddess Shemiramot, represented by a male slave. 
He sat on a throne with his face painted white and red, 
wore chains, lunar earrings and a red robe, and held the cup 
of the seasons in one hand and a double axe, symbolising 
the two monthly lunar crescents, in the other. He was 
surrounded by women, and during the feast he, like the 
Satnam Guru of the Chuttisgurh Chamars and the ruling 
priests of the Maharaja Vishnu sect in Western India, had 
rights over all the women in the camp. During the first day 
there was a general feast. On the second Ninus, the setting 
Orion, was imprisoned underground; and placed in charge of 
the springs then being filled by the rains of the rainy season. 
On the removal of Ninus, homage was done to his herma- 
phrodite double, Shemiramot, as queen. On the last of the 
five days the slave who represented her was burnt as the 
sacrifice of the dying sun-god 2 , a rite marking an earlier 

* Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 472, 480, 497 ; Chron. Pasch.^ 
vol. i. p. 64 ; Codremus, vol. i. p. 27 ; Athenceus, xiv. p. 639. 
2 Ibid., vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 491, 492 ; Curtius, v. 1. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 237 

form of the sacrifice on the fifth day of the lamb slain at 
the Potraj festival in South India. 

This festival of the marriage of Shemiramot and Ninus 
(Orion), with the interchange of male and female clothes, 
characterising the age of lunar-solar worship, beginning with 
the cycle-year, was celebrated all over South-western Asia, 
and in Tarsus a dog, the dog-star Sirius, was burnt as 
the south-going sun-god r . 

This same festival is celebrated in India as the Rath-jatra, 
or chariot wedding procession of Krishna or Rama, the 
antelope sun-god Orion, or the ploughing ox, with his twin- 
sister Durga or Su-bhadra, the mountain-goddess. It is 
held at Mathura, the holy shrine of Krishna, sacred to the 
"turner of the earth" (math), on the 17th of ^shadha, the 
modern Asarh (June — July), that is at the beginning of July. 
This festival is also held in Chutia Nagpur at the same 
time, so that they agree exactly in date with that of Shemi- 
ramot at Babylon. 

The year-bride in the story of Rama, son of Kushaloya, 
the house or mother of the Kushite race, was Sita, who was, 
as we have seen on p. 208, united'to him as king of the cycle- 
year. She was first the furrow ploughed in the sky by 
Rama, the ox, in his monthly circuit round the heavens 
of the Nag-kshetra stars ; and afterwards the crescent-moon, 
which made the same circuit. She was freed from the 
clutches of Ravana, the ten-headed giant of the cycle-year, 
ruling its ten months of gestation, and of his three generals, 
the three years of its duration 2 : Prahasta, the foremost 
hand (hasta), the stars Gemini, the hands of the gods ; 
Kumbha-karna, the maker (karna) of the year water-jars 
(kumbha), the Great Potter ; and Indrajit, the maker of the 

1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. pp. 457, 497. 

* In the variant form of the story of Rama and Sita told in the Buddhist 
Jataka, book xi. no. 461, Rama is said to have returned from his wanderings, 
that is, from his circuit of the sky as a year-god after three years' absence, 
thus shewing that he was a year-god of the three-years cycle. Rouse, Jataka, 
vol. iv. book xi. no. 461, p. 82. 

V 



238 History and Chronology 

year-net of the cycle time measurement, in which Rama 
and his brother Lakshman, the guider of the plougher 
of the furrow, were all but suffocated, till they were revived 
by the water of life. Of these rulers of the cycle-year, 
Prahasta was slain by Vibhishana, the brother of Ravana 
the year-god, who conducted Rama's army to Ravana's 
southern stronghold, in Ceylon, over the year-bridge of 
360,000 monkeys (360 days), Kumbha-karna and Indrajit 
by Lakshman x . It was Rama himself, the god of the new- 
year of the sun-horse, to be described in the next Chapter, 
who slew Ravana from the year-car of Indra, into which he 
was conducted by Vibhishana, the year-god 2 . 

After this victory, the June — July wedding procession 
of Rama and Sita from Ceylon began and ended with the 
installation of Rama as king of Ayodhya in the North-east, 
in the beginning of Sravana (July — August) 3, as described 
in the Mahabharata. This midsummer festival to the year- 
god of the mother-mountain, crowned with the lunar- 
crescent, is also that of the Devil Dancers, held yearly in 
Dardistan, the traditional birth-place of the Indian Dar~ 
danian sons of the antelope. It is held on the slopes 
of the central Pamir table-land, the Hindu Mount Meru, 
which became in the later days of sun-worship the successor 
of Mount Mandara, the first central mountain of the Indian 
Kushikas 4. 

The third feast of the cycle-year was that of the vernal 
equinox, beginning the third year of ten lunar months, 
extending from the vernal equinox to the winter solstice. 
This division of the cycle-year is that marked in the Latin 
year reckoning by the name of December the tenth {decern) 
month given to that which concludes it. The best historical 
evidence as to this festival, and its connection with the 

1 Mahabharata Vana {Dranpadi-harana) Parva, cclxxxii., cclxxxv. — cclxxxviii. 
pp. 839, 844—853. 

2 Ibid., cclxxxix. pp. 855 — 857. 

3 Ibid., ccxc. p. 862. 

4 Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, Third Edition, chap. xiii. pp. 200—223. 

* 



of the Myth- Making Age, 239 

measurement of time, is that given by the Roman festivals 
of — (1) The twenty-three days' procession of the fully-armed 
twelve Quirinal and twelve Palatine Salii, or dancing priests, 
carrying the twelve Ancilia, or year-shields, through the 
twenty - four Argei, or stations marking the boundaries 
of the ancient city, and ending with the Tubilustrium, or 
Purification of the Trumpets {tuba), with which the opening 
of the year was announced, and the sacrifice of a lamb 
representing, as in the other cycle festivals I have noticed, 
the Ram-sun; (2) The festivals of Mamurius on the 14th of 
March ; and of (3) Anna Perenna on the 15th full-moon day 
of the month. 

The Sabine Mamurius is the male god of this connected 
series of New Year religious ceremonies. He is the equivalent 
of Ouirinus, the god of the revolving or running year (kur), 
whose priests, the Salii, danced in circles round the Pole, 
the central god of the rotating earth, like the dancing 
dervishes of the East, wearing the three-knotted girdle of 
the three seasons of Orion's year. He was the god of 
Increase or growth, the Etrurian Maso, and a form of the 
Sabine god called Semo Sancus, who, as I have shown in 
Chapter IV. p. 164, is the god of the sacred grain (sagmen). 
Hence he was the god of the sons of the Kusha grass who 
made the spring grass to grow. 

This series of March festivals is in the Roman Calendar 
entirely based on the New and Full Moons, by which the 
months of the cycle-year were measured. They begin with 
the new moon of the 1st of March, when the year fires of 
Rome were lighted, and the first especially sacred day 
after this New Year's Day is the 9th of March, when the 
Calendar tells usjthat they (i.e. the Salii) move the Ancilia. 
No extant authorities tell us what this ceremony actually 
was, but the fact that it took place on the ninth day, the 
last day of the cycle-week, marks it as connected with the 
epoch. The next special ceremony connected with the 
circuit of the Salii is that of the Feriae Marti on the 19th, 
when the shields of the Salii were purified ; and this seems 



240 History and Chronology 

to be connected with the second nine-days week, ending 
on the 1 8th of March, after which the purifying ceremony 
was performed at the beginning of the third and last week 
of the month. The last special ceremony of the Salii pro- 
cession was that of the Tubilustrium on the twenty-third. 
This took place fourteen days after the 9th, a number 
which may perhaps be the result of the reformation made 
in the calendar, and the adoption of the seven-days week. 

The festivals of Mamurius on the 14th, and of Anna 
Perenna on the 15th of March, when taken together as 
parts of one series of ceremonies, show a close approximation 
between these spring equinoctial celebrations and those 
of the marriage of Shemiramot and Ninus at the summer 
solstice. On the 14th of March Mamurius Veturius, clad 
in skins, the old (vetus) year-god of the deer-year, was 
beaten with long white rods, and driven out of the city. 
This expulsion of the old year-god of increase at the close 
of his year is an exact parallel to the underground imprison- 
ment of Ninus (Orion) on the day after his marriage 1 . 
This expulsion of the male side of the combined male and 
female figures of the bisexual year-god, the warrior-god 
represented in the military array of the Salii, is followed by 
the license of the New Year's festival of the female Shemi- 
ramot Anna Perenna, installed as year-queen, and mother 
of the sun-god, on the deposition of her male counterpart, 
thrown out of the hive like a drone bee. During this festival 
the Roman people lived in booths in the Campus Martius 
on the banks of the Tiber, the mother-river 2 , and it was 
therefore one of the ancient series of New Year's Feasts 
of Booths or Tents. The following lines of Ovid describing 
it show clearly that these feasts were a* reproduction of 
the dancing seasonal festivals of the sons of the village 
tree : — 



1 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Martius, pp. 48, note 2, 
49 ; Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 208. 
3 Ibid., pp. 50 ff. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 241 

" Idibus est Annse festum generate Perennae, 
Haud procul a ripis, advena Tibre, tuis. 
Plebs venit, et virides passim disjecta per herbas 
Potat, et accumbit cam pare quisque sua. 
Sub love pars durat : pauci tentoria ponunt : 
Sub quibus e ramis frondea facta casa est. 
Pars ibi pro rigidis calamos statuere columnis : 
Desuper extentas deposuere togas. 
Sole tamen vinoque calent : annosque precantur, 
Ouot sumunt cyathos ; ad numerumque bibunt. 
Illic et cantant, quod didicere theatris ; 
Et ducunt posito duras cratere choreas, 
Nunc mihi cur cantant superest obscaena puellae 
Dicere, nam coeunt certaque proba canunt." j 

Ovid, Fasti III. sSaFf. 

When we consider the great strength of the evidence 
proving that very many of the rituals of Europe, and es- 
pecially those of the Southern maritime countries, were 
imported from the East, there can be little doubt that this 
Anna, the Roman goddess of the vernal equinox, is the 
Carthaginian virgin-goddess Anna, sister and predecessor 
of Dido, the beloved one (dod), the sun-goddess, also called 
Elissa, a reproduction of the Phoenician El Hazeh, the 
strong one. She and her male double are apparently spring 
parallels of the two goats of the autumnal scape-goat sacri- 
fices, survivals of a year of two seasons of the goat-god, 
measured by the equinoxes. In these, as described on 
p. 142, the scape-goat Aziz or Azazel was driven into the 
wilderness like Mamurius, the male form of Anna, and either 
Dido, with the arms and clothes of her male counterpart 
yEneas, or, according to Varro, Anna, was burnt as the god 
sacrificed in this age of burnt-offerings in the March sacrifice 
to Anna Perenna mentioned by Macrobius r . 

This Phoenician and Roman Anna is therefore the Anath 
or village goddess of Palestine called Anah, the name of the 

1 Movers, Die Phonizicr, vol. i. chap. xvii. pp. 612 — 616; Virg. ALn., 
iv. 495 — 507 ; W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Martius, 
p. 51 ; Macrobius, Sat., i. 126. 

R 



242 History and Chronology 

mother of Aholibama, the Hittite wife of Esau, the goat- 
god 1 , the goddess of the tent (Ahol) festivals, denounced 
by Ezekiel xxiii. 36—46, as carried on by the worshippers 
of Aholah and Aholibah 2 . She was the Akkadian and 
Hindu goddess Arm, and as the primaeval mother-goddess 
she was the mother-tree. It is in her Indian festivals as 
the goddess of the Sal-tree-mother of the sun-god, the 
Munda-Dravido tree-mother, that we find the earliest form 
of the annual dances of the sons of the rivers at the vernal 
equinox, which survives in the European carnival. This 
festival is called that of the Sar-hul, or the blossoming of 
the Sal-tree, or Bahu Puja, the festival of the goddess 
Bahu, and is one of the chief festivals of the Mundas, 
Ooraons and Santals. The two former celebrate it at the 
beginning of the month of Cheit (March — April), that is 
at the New Moon after the vernal equinox, the original 
date at which it was held, while among the Santals it takes 
place during the previous month, Phalgun or Arjuna (Feb- 
ruary — March) 3, that is at the date of the Roman festival 
of the procession of the Salii, a retrogression caused by 
the subsequent changes in year reckonings, which will be 
told in future chapters. This was the tree clasped by the 
mother of the Buddha at his birth, that is the tree from 
which the sun-god was born 4, and his birth was. greeted by 
a shower of rain. This is still commemorated by the throw- 
ing of water by the women over their male friends, from 
a peculiarly shaped bottle made for this festival by the San- 
tals. It is also universally observed in Burmah, and among 
the Ooraons it begins with the worship of the Sarna Burhi, or 
tree-mother of the Sarna village grove, to whom five fowls, 
in commemoration of the original five-days week, are offered. 



1 Gen. xxxvi. i. 

2 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xii. p. 492 ; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures 
for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 18S. 

3 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. ii., Munda, p. 104, Ooraon, 
p. 146, Santal, p. 233. 

* Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories ; The Mddnakathd, p. 66. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 243 

The general water-battle begins with the drenching of the 
Pahan or priest with water by the women of each house, 
to whom he presents sal flowers. 

It is the Munda date of this festival which survives in 
Greece in the Greater Dionysia, held in Elaphebohon (March 
— April), the month of the sprouting of the deer's (eXafos) 
horns, a name commemorating the spring festival of the 
deer-sun-god. This god was Dionusos, son of Semele, 
the Phoenician goddess Samlath, a form of Shemiramot. 

The fourth festival of the cycle-year was that of the 
winter solstice, at which the sun-god, the offspring of its 
four periods of gestation, was to be conceived so as to be 
born at the autumnal equinox. This was a reproduction 
of the old feast of the death and birth "of the deer-sun-god, 
and it was in India a festival of the harvest-home, when 
the rice crops were stored, called Pongol by the Madras 
Dravidians, and Sohrai by the Santals. 

In Italy this harvest festival of the South was reproduced 
in the Consualia of the 1 5th December. This was in the 
Roman ritual a subordinate festival to that of the Consualia 
of August 2 1st. That is to say, the earlier December fes- 
tival was superseded in sanctity by the later August feast, 
which was, as we shall see later on, a mid-year feast of 
the year of fifteen months, to be described in Chapter VII. 
The god Consus, the god of the storing (condere) of the 
crops, was a god worshipped in an underground temple 
like that of Llyr at Leicester, described on p. 63. His 
priest was the Flamen Ouirinalis, that is the priest of the 
god Ouirinus of this cycle-year *. The festival of the 
December harvest-god was followed by the seven days of 
the Saturnalia, beginning on the 17th of December, the 
New-Moon feast of the ten -months year, beginning with the 
Hindu month of Push (December — January), the month 
of the barley-god Push-an. The corresponding Greek fes- 

1 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis December, pp. 267, 268, 
Mensis Sextilis, pp. 206-20S. 

R 2 



244 History and Chronology 

tival was that of the Lesser Dionysia held in Poseidon 
(December— January) in honour of Dionysius Nuktelios, the 
Arcadian god of the lower world, the home of the winter- 
sun. He was worshipped at Megara at the winter solstice, 
his feast celebrating his descent into the lower world to 
seek Semele, the daughter of Kadmus, whose sister Ino 
was the wife of Athamas, Ionic Tammas, the Akkadian 
Dumu-zi, and the mother of Melicertes, the Phoenician sun- 
god Melkarth, lord (malik) of the city (karth). This Diony- 
sius Nuktelios, husband of Semele Samlath, or Shemiramot, 
was the male god who was to bring her to the North as the 
summer sun, and make her mother of the sun-god born at 
the autumnal equinox. This Megara festival of the marriage 
of Dionysius Nuktelios with Shemiramot at the winter 
solstice was accompanied by the same orgiastic dances 
which marked the other festivals of the cycle-year J . This 
winter descent of the sun-god into the subterranean regions 
of the South was also celebrated at the festival held in 
Argolis on the Alcyonian Lake, near Lerna, and at Cynaethae 
in Arcadia, when a bull was sacrificed to him, and he was 
called to come up out of the lake as the young bull-god 
of Spring *, the father of the god to be born at the autumnal 
equinox 2 , the night sun {Helios) god of winter. 

The ruling gods of this cycle of three years, with its four 
successive festivals, separated by equal intervals of ten lunar 
months, were the mother-goddess, originally the mother-tree, 
and her spouse the rain-god, who made his way into her 
enclosing tower of the three revolving years. This was the 
marriage-chariot of Krishna and Su-bhadra of Shemiramot 
and Ninus. But before their incarceration in this tower 
of the Garden of God, watered by the life-giving rain, they 
were separate male and female deities. The male deity was 
the father-god whose sacrifice, in that of his counterpart, his 
eldest son, fertilised the earth, into which the blood, the 



1 Frazer, Pausam'as, i. 40, 5, vol. i. p. 61, ii. 525. 

- Ibid., ii. 27, 6, viii. 19, 1, vol. i. pp. 130, 397, vol. iii. pp. 302, 303. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 245 

divine seed, flowed, and made it bear a numerous offspring. 
This god was in the Mahabharata the king Somaka with 
a hundred wives, but only one son, Jantu, born after long 
years of expectation. The sacrifice of the son was followed 
by the pregnancy of all the hundred wives, who each bore 
a son, and among these Jantu was re-born as the second 
son of his mother l . 

E. Human Sacrifices. 

The history of this rite of human sacrifice with its 
attendant ritual is told most clearly in that of the worship 
of Zeus Lykaios, of Arcadia, and the Semite mountain- 
father-god. The altar of this god, said in Arcadian 
tradition to have been erected by Lycaon, the wolf (Xu/co?), 
god of light and son of Pelasgus, the Hebrew Peleg, for the 
sacrifice of his new-born son, was a mound of earth 2 . 
It was placed, as described by Pausanias, on the highest 
summit of the central Lycsean mountain, and before it, 
when he saw it, were two pillars nearly facing the East, 
on which two gilt eagles were engraved 3. But to ascertain 
the full meaning of this altar, and the ritual of the human 
sacrifices offered on it, we must turn to another example 
of it, in which its inner meaning has been told by the rules 
of construction enjoined by the priestly guardians and 
transmitters of the national traditions. This altar of a 
mound of earth, made in the form of a woman, appears with 
its explanatory adjuncts in the national altar of the Chinese 
Empire placed on the top of the round hillock near Pekin, 
under the triple-roofed circular temple, recalling in its three 
roofs the three years of this cycle. This is oriented to the 
sun of the winter solstice 4, the time when Orion's year and 
that of the solstitial sun-bird began, and dedicated to Shang-ti, 
the Pole Star god. The traditions of this altar, on which 

1 Mahabharata Vana {Tirtha-Yatra) Parva, cxxvii. , cxxviii. pp. 386, 389. 

2 Frazer, Pausanias, viii. 2, 1, vol. i. p. 374. 

3 Ibid., viii. 38, 7, vol. i. 424. 

* Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. ix. pp. 88, 89. 



246 History and Chronology 

the Emperor offers yearly, while facing the North, a first- 
born male animal as a whole-burnt sacrifice, clearly points 
to the cycle epoch of the nine-days week, and the year 
divided into months of twenty-seven days each. These last 
are commemorated by the twenty- seven steps to the top 
of the platform on which the altar stands, and the nine-days 
week by the nine circles of marble slabs round the circular 
stone forming the altar. The innermost of these circles 
is one of nine slabs, and each circle increases its slabs 
in multiples of nine up to the ninth circle of 9x9=81 *. 
Thus the mound-altar was the altar of the ritual of the 
cycle-year 2 . 

The two pillars before the altar of Zeus Lykaios, de- 
scribed by Pausanias, were those said by Herodotus ii. 44 
to stand before the temple of Herakles at Tyre, and which 
were set up in front of all Phoenician and Egyptian temples. 
Of these one was dedicated to the god Chiun, the pillar 
which became Solomon's pillar Jachin, its hiphil form. 
This was the pillar of Usof the hunter, the Hebrew Esau, 
called Khammam or Hammam, the green pillar, the pillar 
of the god of the summer solstice ; and the other was that 
of Usof's brother Hypsuranius, the golden pillar, the Boaz 
or moving pillar of the winter solstice 3. The eagles on these 
two pillars were the mother-cloud-bird, the Zend Hu Kairiya. 
This altar of Zeus Lykaios was exactly similar to that 
of Saturn Balcaranensis in Africa 4. 

This primitive altar with the two pillars in front of it was 
placed under the open sky, and had no temple attached 
to it, but when the pastoral shepherd races began to leave 
the mountain heights and descend to the river villages 

1 Professor Douglas, Confucianism and Taoism, pp. 82 — 87. 

= The Irish ritual of the sacrifice of eldest sons to Crom Croich, the god 
of the central pillar of the sun circle, proves that these victims were offered 
to the sun-god. Meyer and Nutt, The Voyage of Bran, Ritual Sacrifice in 
Ireland, vol. ii. pp. 149, 150. 

3 Movers, Die Phonhier, vol. i. chap. vii. p. 292 , chap. viii. pp. 343, 346. 

4 Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadieus, ii., Le Culte de Zeus Lycaios, pp. 
72, 73- 



of the Myth-Making Age. 247 

to feed their herds, a change of ritual followed their descent. 
This appears in the cult of the Lycaean Zeus, in the Temenos 
or sacred enclosure dedicated to this god on the lower 
slopes of the mountain, and that of Saturn Balcaranensis. 
This Temenos was a survival of the village grove of the 
primaeval faiths, and it was to judge from the copy of 
it made at Megalopolis, and described by Pausanias, sur- 
rounded by stones, like the sun circles at Solwaster. In its 
centre was the stone temple of Zeus Lykaios, open in front 
with two altars before it and two tables along the side walls, 
above each of which was an eagle with outspread wings 
extending to the length of the tables x . But this enclosure, 
copied apparently from the stone circles of the North, was 
not like the village grove, open to all comers, and especially 
to the dancers at the festivals. Entrance to it was forbidden 
under pain of death. This prohibition marks the temple, 
to the precincts of which it was applied, as a product of the 
age of the worship of the virgin-mother and unsexed father, 
of the creed of the worshippers of the central mountain 
revolving in the surrounding ocean. It was as a repro- 
duction of this conception of the abode of the creating gods 
that Phoenician temples, like that of Ai'n al Hayat, de- 
scribed by Renan, and that at Mabug by Lucian, were placed 
in the centre of a natural or artificial lake 2 , that made 
by Elijah round the altar he built on Carmel 3. This temple 
was reproduced in Egypt in the lake-temple at Buto dedi- 
cated to Latona, goddess of the tree-trunk, and her son 
Apollo, as described in Herodotus ii. 156. 

These were the temples of the Turanian king Frangrasyan 
built in the Chaechasta lake, the modern Urumiah in Adar- 
baijan, whom Hushrava slew 4. This was a salt-water lake 
representing the salt sea whence the goddess Shemiramot 
was born. The building of these lake temples, which could 

1 Fraser, Pausanias, viii. 38, 6, 30, 2, vol. i.jfpp. 424, 463 ; Berard, Origine 
des Cultcs Arcadiens, pp. 72, 73, 87, 88. 

2 Renan. Phenicie, pp. 63 — 67 ; Lucian, Dc Dea Syria, pp. 45, 46. 

3 1 Kings xviii. 30 ff. 

4 Darmesteter, Zendavtsta Gos Yasht, iv. ; S. B.E., vol. xxiii. p. 114. 



248 History and Chronology 

only be approached by boats provided by the priests, marks 
the growth of sacerdotal influence, and it was from these 
shrines, which human feet could not reach without help, that 
the idea arose of the sanctity of the temple precincts, and 
the prohibition of entering them with shodden feet. 

The tables within them were the altar of incense and the 
table of shew-bread in the Holy of Holies of the Jewish 
tabernacle and temple, the latter being that on which the 
firstfruits were offered. It was on this table that the 
Athenian Cecrops, son of Erectheus the snake-god, offered 
the Pelanoi or cakes of honey, barley, meal, and oil which 
he presented as the earlier firstfruits' offering instead of the 
later eldest son offered by Lycaon on the altar of sacrifice I . 
This table and the temple sanctuary in which it stood were 
placed in the sun-circle surrounded with the gnomon-stones, 
within which, according to primaeval custom, no blood 
could be shed, while the altar of sacrifice on the top of the 
mountain answered to the dolmen or stone of sacrifice of 
the Palaeolithic age of the northern totemistic clans. 

F. Incense worship and international trade. 

The second table in the sanctuary, the incense altar, gives 
us a complete clue to the history of this epoch. The incense 
there burnt was a substitute, conceived in the lowlands, for 
the clouds which wreathed the mountain tops where the 
earliest altars were made. This ritual of burnt sacrifice ac- 
companied by incense was that of the priest-god Dhaumya 
of the Mahabharata, the priest of smoke idJiumd) of the 
Pandava brethren. The incense whence the sacred fumes 
arose was that extracted from the Indian incense tree, the 
Salai (Bosivellia thurifera), which grows on the top of every 
rocky hill in Central India where nothing else will grow. 
This frankincense with the Indian gold washed from the sand 
of the rivers of Chutia Nagpur, the Sone, the river of gold 
(sona), the Subonrika or Suvarnariksha, the river of the tribe 

1 Fraser, Pausanias, viii. 2, I, vol. i. p. 374. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 249 

(varna) of the Sus with its golden sand, and those of the 
brooks of Sona-pet, the golden womb, the ancient treasure- 
houses of Indian wealth, and the spices of the South, was 
the most valuable merchandise exported to foreign lands 
by the descendants of the Indian twin-gods Yadru-Turvasu. 
These Hittite sons of the Full Moon ( Yd), whose god (vasu) 
was the revolving Pole (tur) Star god, the dweller in the 
Caer Sidi or Turning castle where the Holy Grail, the seed 
of life, was preserved in the mother-tree of the Southern 
Ocean, were the founders of the three most ancient ports 
in Western India : — the Yadava port of Dwarika, the door 
[dwar) of Khatiawar, the holy land of the Khati or joined 
twins, that of Pragjyotisha or Baragyza, the modern Broach, 
called in the Mahabharata Prabhasa, at the mouth of the 
Nerbudda, and Surparaka, the modern Surat, at the mouth 
of the Payoshni, now called Tapti, built according to the 
Mahabharata by a Vidarba, that is by a Gond or Haihaya 
king who used the Semite word "arba" to denote four 1 . 
The name Pragjyotisha, the star (jyotis) of the East, shows 
the importance attached to it as the port of the mother-river 
of the Haihaya kings who were the earliest imperial rulers 
of North India. This and Surparaka were the two ports 
of the king called in the Mahabharata Bhagadatta, the 
offspring of the tree of edible fruit (bhaga), the fig and 
mango tree. He is called the King of the Yavanas, or 
growers of barley (j/ava), who were, as we are told elsewhere, 
the Turvasu, the king who bore on his head the most 
wonderful jewel on earth, the light of the Western sun, the 
Pole Star. He was subordinate to Jarasandha 2 , and 
though he was the maternal uncle of the Pandavas, brother 
of KuntI, or Prithi their mother, and that of Kama, he 
fought in the final battle between the Kauravyas and 
Pandavas on the side of the former, and was slain by 

1 Mahabharata Vana (Tirlha-Yalra) Parva, cxviii., cxix., cxx. pp. 363, 364, 

36S, 37 *• 

2 Mahabharata Sabha (Rajasuyarambha) Tarva, xv. p. 45, Adi (Sambhavd) 
Parva, lxxxv. p. 260. 



250 History and Chronology 

Arjuna, as Krishna had formerly slain Naraka, the man 
(nara) god, the bisexual god of this epoch I . 

It was from these ports that the Turvasu or Yavana ships 
carried the wealth of India to the foreign lands on the coasts 
of the Indian Ocean. Their first foreign station was the 
island in the Persian Gulf, whence, according to Theophrastus, 
the Phoenicians said they originally came. This, the modern 
Bahrein, celebrated for its pearl fishery, they called Turos. 
It was the holy Akkadian island Dilmun, the Isle of God 
(dil), where la first appeared to human eyes as En-zag, the 
first-born (sag) son of god (en), the fish-born son of the 
waters. He was worshipped as Pati, the lord which identi- 
fies him with the Hindu Praja-pati 2 . It was thence they 
began their career as the roving merchants of South-western 
Asia, whose ships made their way along the coasts of Arabia 
to the country called by the Akkadians Magana, the jewel 
mines of Sinai, or the Mountain of Sin, the moon, a name 
they brought with them from the Indian land of Sindhu. 
This name Sin was originally, according to Lenormant, 
Singh or Sik, and was given first to the land of the Sume- 
rians, the Euphratean Delta. This is called Shinar in the 
Bible, Singara by the Greeks, Sindjar by the Arabian 
geographers, and was that ruled by the three-eyed and 
two-horned wild-bull-god Samir-us or Shemiramot, who 
ruled Babylon, as we have seen, after Ninfrod or Ninus 
(Orion). 

He was the bisexual-god, the male form of Shemiramot, 
who invented weights and measures and the art of silk- 
weaving 3. This was the three-eyed-god Shiva of the 
Hindus, whose wife or female counterpart was the weaving 
Uma, the flax (uma) goddess, the goddess-mother of the flax 
weavers of Asia Minor, who became the Egyptian goddess 
Neith, meaning the weaver ; the goddess who supplied the 
mummy cloths of the dead in Egypt, all of which are made 

1 Mahabharata Drona (Samsaptika-badha) Parva, xxix. pp. 95 — 98, 

2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. ii. p. 114, note I. 

3 Lenormant, Chaldccan Magic, pp. 395, 396, note 2, 402. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 251 

of flax, and from this flax were made the most sacred 
dresses of the Egyptian and those of the Jewish priests *. 
The silks woven by their worshippers were those called 
by Hiouen Tsiang Kauseya or Kushite cloth, made from 
the cocoons of the jungle tusser moth, which supplied the 
yellow robes worn by the early Buddhist mendicants called 
Kasayam, and which were, he tells us, the common garments 
of the people of the Northern and Southern Punjab 2 . They 
also wore garments of kshauma or hemp, the modern jute, 
the flax of Uma, as well as of cotton, and wove fine goat's- 
hair blankets, Kambala, which now appear as Rampore 
Chudders, whence the Kambhojas of the Northern Punjab 
and the men of Kambojia, in the north of the Malay Penin- 
sula, got their names. 

The cotton garments of these sons of the weavers and 
potters were originally made of the cotton of the Simul 
(Bombax heptapJtylla), or red-cotton tree, the Sanskrit Shil- 
mili. It was from the wood of this tree and that of the 
Kimshuka, the Palasha {Butea frondosa) tree, that the car 
was made in which the Ashvins drove the sun-maiden when 
they brought her to be married to Soma, the male moon- 
god 3. This cotton-tree is the sacred tree of the offerers 
of human sacrifices, which was always planted with appro- 
priate rites above the sacrificial stone where the Meriah 
victims were to be slain whenever a new village was founded 
by the Kandhs of Orissa, who call themselves Kui-loka, the 
people of the Gond mother-goddess Koi, and who retained 
the rite of human sacrifice longer than any other race 
in India 4. 

But on the coming of the Kurmis or Kaurs the cotton 
of this tree was superseded by the cotton Karpasi {gossy- 

1 Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, The Ancient Egyptians, vol. ii. chap. ix. p. 15S. 
The flax plant in India is not now used for weaving but only for its oil-seeds. 

2 Beal, Records of the Western World, vol. i. pp. 75, 165, 168. 

3 Rg. x. 85, 20. 

4 Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, p. 145; Risley, Tribes and 
Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Kandhs, p. 297. 



252 History and Chronology 

pium herbaceum), which they sowed yearly, and whence the 
Western land of Saurashtra, the kingdom {rashtrd) of the 
Saus, the inland part of Khatlawar, got the name of 
Karpasika, the cotton land, by which it is called in the 
Mahabharata I . It was the cloth woven from this which was 
called in the earliest Babylonian documents Sipat Kuri, 
or the cloth of the land of Kur, and also Sindhu, from the 
land of Sin or Singh, the horned-moon-god, the sadin of 
the Old Testament and the sindon (aivScov) of the Greeks 2 . 

It was these merchants who also imported into Arabia 
and Europe the cinnamon of Ceylon, mentioned by Herodotus 
iii. in as one of the products brought by the Phoenician 
traders. Their generic name, when they settled in Arabia, 
was, as I have told in Chapter II., that of Atjub, or col- 
lectors of incense (tib\ the original form of the Greek name 
of ^Ethiopian 3 ; and they were the Midianites of the Bible, 
who organised the land caravans which brought Eastern 
produce overland along the course of the Euphrates, and 
thence to the Mediterranean through the city of Haran, 
the road (kharram). This was the city of Laban, mean- 
ing " the white-god," called in Assyrian inscriptions " the 
builder of the brick foundation of heaven 4," the tower of the 
Garden of God of this epoch, whose image was a stone 
surmounted by a star. 

This city of the moon-god of the tower is the father of 
Lot and son of Terah, the antelope, who was also father 
of the Hebrew Ab-ram, the father-ram, the Hindu Rama. 
Lot means concealment and a veil, and the root meaning- 
of the word is " incense 5." Thus in Lot we find the incense- 
god of the men of Haran, the city of .the white-moon-god 
" of the brick foundation of heaven," the god of the three- 
years cycle; and we also learn from this historical genealogy 

1 Mahabharata Sabha (Dyuta) Parva, li. p. 141. 

2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i., iii. p. 138. 

3 Glaser, Die Abyssinier in Arabien und Africa, p. 10. 

* Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 249, note 3. 
s Gesenius, Thesaurus, s.v. Lot, p. 748 ; Gen. xi. 27, 28. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 253 

that this incense ritual concealing the hidden god from 
profane eyes was that of the sons of the antelope and of 
the god Ram, whose eastern wife was Keturah, meaning 
the " incense " mother x . 

The sons of Lot, the incense-god, were Ammon, the sup- 
porter, and Moab, the father (ab) of the waters, begotten 
of his two daughters, the two wives of the trident father-god, 
when he was inspired by the wine consumed by the creating 
gods of this epoch, and when he dwelt in the mother-cave 
of the Turanian races 2 . Of these Ammon, the supporter, 
was the earlier Egyptian god of Thebes, Amon, the Hidden, 
called in the Book of the Dead " prince of the gods of the 
East, lord of the two horns, the divine bull-scarab 3," the 
roller or turner of the earth ball. In Chapters CLXV. 
and CLXIII. he is depicted as an ithyphallic man-beetle, 
with plumes on his head, standing in front of a man with 
a ram's head on each shoulder, and as a horned serpent 
with legs and a lunar disk on his head. He is thus the 
turner of the pole of the revolving earth, hidden in the 
clouds of incense which filled the Egyptian temples, the god 
descended from the original parent-bird and snake who 
had become ruler of the cycle-year. 

For the history of Moab, the father (ab) of the waters, 
we must turn to that of the contemporaneous twin gods 
of the Greek incense mythology, Kastor and Poludeukes, 
who became the twin stars Gemini, the door-posts of heaven. 
They were the sons of Leda, the feminine form of Ledon 
(XtjSov), the mastich-shrub (Pistaccia lentiscus) yielding the 
incense Ledanon burnt in the Greek temples. This was, 
according to Herodotus iii. ill, originally used in religious 
sacrifices by the Arabians, and was, as we now see, brought 
from India to Arabia by the Turvasu traders, who carried 
it, with the other mercantile contents of their caravans, 
to Haran on the Euphrates, whence the incense ritual passed 



1 Gen. xxv. 6. 2 Gen. xix. 26 — 38. 

3 Buige, Book of the Dead, Translation, chaps, clxv., clxiii. pp. 295, 292. 



254 History and Chronology 

through Syria to the shores of the Mediterranean and 
thence to Greece. There the twin gods, sons of the incense- 
mother, became the patron gods of the Dorian immigrants 
from Asia Minor and of Sparta, the country in which 
the Indian Dravidian customs of common meals and the 
state education of children were more deeply rooted than 
in any other Grecian territory. They were the reputed sons 
of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, the hammer (tud, tund ) god 
of the North, the divine smith of the Kabiri. But Tyn- 
dareus was the father only of Kastor, the pole (stor) of 
Ka, the sexless beaver, the house-builder of the Northern 
races. Poludeukes, the wetting (Sevco) rain-god, the Semitic 
Moab, father (ab) of the waters, was the son of Zeus, the 
Pole Star god, and the mother-cloud-bird. They belonged 
to the crew of the original star-ship Argo, the mother con- 
stellation of the dwellers on the shores of the Indian Ocean. 
It was the merchant traders of India, worshippers of these 
twin star-gods, guardians of the gate of heaven, who brought 
the cycle-year to Europe, where they set up its calendar, 
which i I shall describe presently, in the ten rows of stones 
at Kermario, near Carnac in Britany, and placed in them 
the two index - stones marking the sunrise at the solstices 
and equinoxes J . It was they who made the year beginning 
with the autumnal equinox that of Syria, Asia Minor, and 
Southern Greece. They brought with them a fresh influx 
of Indian traditional history, ritual and local customs, in 
addition to the Indian teachings of the Amazonian races. 
The Dravidian mariners, who had learnt the arts of naviga- 
tion in the Indian Ocean, and established the sea-faring 
trade of India with the Euphratean countries, Arabia and 
Egypt, now, on the shores of the Mediterranean, joined the 
matriarchal races, and the Basque population descended 
from them. These amalgamated Dravido-Turano Dorian 
tribes descended from the spear Dor, became the subjects 
of Minos, and among these the Dravidian seafarers were 

1 Gaillard, VAstronomie Prehistorique, vii. p. 73. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 255 

the Carian seamen who, according to Herodotus i. 171, 
made the Minyans rulers of the islands of the ALgean 
sea and of Greece. They, according to Aristotle, cited 
by Strabo viii. p. 374, occupied Epidaurus in Argolis, 
the sacred city where ^Esculapius, the divine physician, 
was said to have been born, and his Indian origin is 
marked by the snake twisted round his left arm, and 
the cocks sacrificed to him. 

The Carians, also like the Indian Pitaro Barishadah, 
buried their dead, and their supreme god Zeus was depicted 
as bearing the double axe of the two lunar crescents 
measuring the cycle-year 1 . Herodotus, in describing them, 
attributes to them the origin of three special customs, (1) of 
wearing cock's combs on their helmets, (2) of painting 
scutcheons on their "shields, and (3) of holding their shields 
by a wooden handle. The two first of these are clearly 
derived from the Indian people who worshipped Ahalya, 
the hen-bird, as the sun-bird circling the heavens, the wife 
of the lunar bull-god Gautama, and sacrificed cocks, the 
Munda sun-offerings, and painted their caste totem marks 
on their foreheads. He also says that the Carian women 
never pronounced their husband's name, a thoroughly Indian 
and Munda custom 2 . 

The introduction into Greece of the Munda jungle fowl 
must date from the epoch when, as we have seen, cocks and 
hens were the sacred birds of Herakles, the sun-god, and 
his wife Hebe, a reproduction of the Indian Ahalya. They 
were also, according to Plutarch, sacrificed to Ares, the 
ploughing iar) god in Sparta, and were the sacred birds 
of the Roman Mars, thus marking him as originally the 
Indian Maroti, the ape-god of the South-west Monsoon 3. 
The Carians also placed the figure of a cock at the end 
of their lances. The cock was the bird sacred to Minos and 
the Minyans, for a cock was the crest painted on the shield 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. pp. 154, 155. 

2 Herodotus, i. 171, 146. 

3 De Gubernatis, Die Tliiere (German Translation), p. 561. 



256 History and Chronology 

of the statue of Idomeneus, the leader of the Minyan Cretans 
in the Trojan war, placed among the offerings of the Sicilian 
Agrigentines in Elis, and there was a figure of a cock on the 
helmet of the statue of Athene, the Ionian tree-mother, in 
the Akropolis of Elis I . Cocks and hens were the birds 
used for augury by the augur priests, who sacrificed them 
and examined the signs shown by their entrails in the sacred 
square, the Roman Templum, divided into four equal parts 
by the cross of St. George. This field was that called in the 
Rigveda and Zendavesta the four-cornered field of Varuna, 
the barley and ram sun-god of this epoch, which is said to 
have conquered the triangle of the year of three seasons 2 . 
This land of the conquering square is said to have been the 
fourteenth of the lands created by Ahura Mazda, and that 
in which Thraetaona, the Vedic Trita, who was, as we have 
seen, the ruling god of the cyle-year, was born. 

The ritual founded on the prophetic signs given by the 
Indian cocks and hens, the sun-birds, was taken to Rome 
with the worship of the Twin Brethren, and those who 
diffused the cult were the seafaring Minyans, called Tursena 
by the Lydians, Tursha by the Egyptians, and Tyrrhenians 
by the Romans and Greeks, the worshippers of the supreme 
god of Asia Minor and the ^Egean islands, who is called 
Pator Tur, the father Tur, in the inscription in Cypriote 
letters on a whorl dedicated to him, and found in the sixth 
settlement from the bottom of the buried cities of Troy. It 
was he who gave his name to the Phrygian city of Turiaion 3, 
and who was originally the Pole Star mother-goddess, the 
counterpart of the Indian and Finnic Tara, the Etrurian 
mother-goddess Tur-an. It was she who in the Etrurian 
folk-tale quoted by Leland 4 gave the father of the future 



1 Frazer, Pausanias, v. 25, 4, vi. 26, 4, vol. i. pp. 277, 324 ; Homer, Iliad, 
ii. p. 643. 

2 Rg. i. 152, 2 ; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Fargard, i. 18, Infroduction, iv. 12 ; 
S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 9, lxiii. 

3 Schluchhardt, Schliemann's Excavations, Appendix i. p. 334. 

4 Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, Tur-anna, pp. 39 — 41. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 257 

sun-god, the ragged peasant, the despised sun, the basket 
of nuts, the fruit of the World's tree, which was to make 
the king's daughter, the tree-sun-mother, pregnant, and who 
was looked on as the Pole Star mother of light and life. 
These Tursena were, as Herodotus i. 57 tells us, a different 
race from the Pelasgians who emigrated from Lydia to 
Umbria in Italy. From the Eugubine tables describing the 
ritual of Iguvium, the modern Gubbio, the capital of Umbria, 
we learn that the Umbrian priests, who divined by the birds, 
wore, like the Pitaro Barishadah of India and the Dervish 
priests of South-western Asia, sacrificial girdles ; and that 
both the Umbrian priests and the Pitaro Barishadah were 
directed in their official sacrifices to wear this girdle-cord 
over the right shoulder. It was also on this shoulder that 
the Umbrian priests were to carry the fire-brazier. They 
were also to pray for protection to the owl (parra) r . This 
was the bird sacred to Athene, the tree-mother-goddess of 
the Ionian race, descended from matriarchal mothers. The 
owl is in India a bird form of Indra, who is called Uluka, the 
owl-god, and the sacred owl of Athene was, according to 
the birth-legend told of her origin, the night-bird-mother 
of the sun-god, the horned moon. She was yEthiope, that 
is, she was a daughter of the Atyub or incense men, the 
daughter of Nykteus, king of the matriarchal island of Lesbos> 
or according to other authorities, of ^Ethiopia, that is of the 
Indian incense collectors. She lay by her father, as Myrrha, 
or Shemiramot, lay by her father Thoas, whom we have 
seen to be a form of Dumu-zi and to be the year-star Orion, 
and was pursued by him with his sword, but was saved by 
Athene, who changed her into an owl, as Myrrha was changed 
into a cypress-tree to become the mother of the sun-god 
Adonis 2 . Thus we see that the owl was, according to Greek 
history, the sacred bird of the age of incense worship, that 

1 Breal, Les Tables Eugubines, v. pp. xliv., xlv. ; Bower, Elevation and Pro- 
cession of the Cerl at Gubbio, Appendix, Translation of the Ancient Lustration 
of the Iguvine People, p. 132. 

2 De Gubernatis, Die Thiere (German Translation), chap. vi. p. 52S. 

S 



258 History and Chronology 

is of the three-years cycle. And in the genealogy of the 
Mahabharata, Uluka is the son of Shakuni the raven, the 
early sacred storm-bird. The sons of the owl, the Ulukas, 
are in the Mahabharata described as a powerful tribe in the 
North-west, living near the fire-worshipping dwellers in the 
SarasvatI, who were conquered by Arjuna. They joined 
the army of the Kauravyas with the men of the Sarasvati, 
and both fought under the command of Shakuni, the raven. 
Uluka, his son, was sent as an ambassador to the Pandavas 
by Duryodhana, the Kauravya leader, before the war, and 
he insulted Arjuna in the course of his embassy, while his 
father Shakuni had, like Pushkara in the story of Nala, 
ruined them by winning their wealth in gambling. Both 
he and his father Shakuni were slain by Sahadeva, the fire- 
god among the Pandavas, ruling the autumn season begin- 
ning at the autumnal equinox, and their forces were the 
last remnant of the Kauravya army, whose defeat and 
destruction left the Pandavas the victorious rulers of India I . 

Hence in this ritual of the Umbrian divining priests who 
worshipped the moon-owl of night we see evidence of the 
migration to Italy of the men of the cycle-year, who made 
the owl their mother-bird instead of the earlier raven, and 
made it the sacred bird of their tree-mother-goddess Athene. 
This was the Athene called the Itonian, who was the 
protecting goddess of the Pan-Boeotian confederacy, whose 
sanctuary containing her image, and that of her male 
counterpart the Zeus of the lower world, called Itanos, the 
god of the South, was the national Boeotian temple at 
Coronea, where the festival of the united gods was held 
yearly at the autumnal equinox when the Boeotian year 
began 2 . It was under the protection of this goddess, to whom 
the owl was sacred, that the Boeotians under Kadmus entered 
Europe from the East, and thence they made their way to 

1 Mahabharata Sabha [Digvijaya) Parva, xxvii. pp. 80, 81, Udyoga ( Yana- 
saiidhi) Parva, lvi. p. 202, Udyoga {Sainya-Niryana) Parva, clx. — clxiv. pp. 462 
— 485, Shalya [Hrada-Pravesha) Parva, xxviii. , xxix. pp. 105 — no. 

2 Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 34, I, vol. i. p. 486, vol. v. p. 169. 




u 



of the Myth- Making Age. 259 

Italy as the Minyan race, sons of the owl-goddess, whom 
they called Mena, Menfra or Minerva, and who was both 
a phallic-serpent and a winged-goddess, the moon-bird of 
night, the protectress of brides 3t , and the measuring {men) 
mother the Egyptian goddess Min, the star, and Virgo. 

G. Plant worship. 

The creed of these Hittite descendants of the Indian 
Turvasu and the owl-mother-goddess of the Minyans is 
depicted in the historical bas-relief of Iasili Kai'a in Cilicia. 
This represents the Hittite father-god wearing the Hittite 
peaked tiara, and their shoes with turned-up toes, descend- 
ing from the mountain, and bearing in his right hand the 
polar sceptre, his magic rain-wand of office, surmounted 
with the earth globe. In his left hand is the symbol 
of the pollen-bearing flower with the seed-vessel rising 
out of the calix, and the sacred antelope, wearing the 
Hittite cap, runs by his side. He, in the copy of the 
bas-relief drawn by Puchstein 2 , which is reproduced on 
the plate annexed, meets, after he has come down to 
the plain and mounted on the shoulders of his Hittite 
priests, the mother-goddess Rhea, the mother of the sons 
of the rivers. She also wears the Hittite shoes and 
the tower head-dress of the goddess of the revolving-year, 
stands on a leopard, and bears in her right hand the 
symbol of the blossomed flower with its petals springing 
from the calix, and bearing the seed-vessel already swelling 
from the infusion of the seed of the male flower. This 
represents the marriage of the plant-parents of life at the 
four wedding festivals of the cycle-year, and behind them, 
standing like his mother on a leopard, the sacred animal 
of Dionysus, son of Semele or Shemiramot, is the son born 
of their union. Between 1 the mother and her full-grown 

1 Deecke, Etruria, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, vol. viii. 637 ; 
Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, Mena, p. 132. 

2 This, according to Signor Milani, is more carefully drawn than that given 
by Perrot, iv. fig. 321. 

S 2 



26o History and Chronology 

son is the walking seed-vessel, the infant who has not yet 
assumed his final human form. In his form of the man-god 
he bears in his right hand the staff on which he leans, and 
in his left the double axe of the Carian and Hittite Zeus, 
while behind him is bound the pickaxe or mattock, headed 
by the lunar crescent I . 

It is the birth of this sun-plant-god which is represented 
in the story of the combat between Horus the son of Hat-hor, 
the Pole Star goddess, and Set the pig-god, told in Chapters 
XVII. and CXII. of the Book of the Dead 2 . Horus is the sun 
of this cycle-year born from the tree crowned by the Pole 
Star, and Set or Suti was, as we have seen in Chapter II. 
p. 75, the god who was changed in his Northern avatar from 
Canopus the ape-god of the South, into the Pig Pole Star 
god in the constellation Kepheus. This pig-god is said to 
have blinded Horus by throwing filth, that is earth, in his 
eyes, thus making him the blind-tree-father and mother of 
life born from the earth. Horus, or rather Thoth, that is 
Dhu-ti the bird {dhii) of life, the moon emasculated Set, that 
is to say, they made him like the emasculated Phrygian god 
Attys, the father-god only visible in the sexless pine-tree, 
the fire-drill. The whole parable tells us that the theology 
of the plant-god of the cycle-year succeeded the worship of 
the Pole Star and the solstitial sun-bird. 

This son of the parent-plants, born of the virgin flower- 
mother, is the exact representation of the Etrurian god 
Sethlans the heavenly smith, and he is in the Indian 
theogony the god called Parasu Rama, or Rama of the 
double-axe, who appeared to the Pandavas clad in a deer- 
skin on the fourteenth day of the moon, thus marking him- 
self as the lunar god of the stellar lunar month of twenty- 
seven days, and who also showed himself on the eighth, 
that is on the eve of the ninth day of his week. He was 

1 Milani, Studi Di Arc/apologia, i., Part i., Nota Esegetica Sulla Stele di 
Amrit. , pp. 35, note 5, 37, figs. 2, 3 ; Puchstein, Reisen in Kleinasieu, Taf. x. 

2 Budge, Book of the Dead, Translation, chapters xvii. 67 — 70, cxii. 2 — 9, 
PP- 52, i77- 



of the Myth- Making Age. 26 1 

the great grandson of Bhrigu the fire-god, and son of 
Jamadagni the twin {jama) fires engendered by Richika 
the fire-spark in the mother-trees, the Banyan fig-tree {Ficus 
Indica) of the Kushikas and the Pipal-tree {Ficus Religiosa) 
sacred to the sun-god. This twin-born god, the seed of life, 
married Renuka the flower-pollen (rmu), and her fifth son 
was Parasu-Rama, that is the son born from the union of 
the parent-plants like the Hittite son of the mother-flower 
who became the Etrurian Sethlans. 

He recovered the year-calf begotten in the cosmological 
hymn of the Rigveda from the year-cow after ten months 
of gestation *, which had been stolen by Arjuna the fair 
{arjuna) Haihaya king, the sun-god with the thousand arms, 
and slew the stealer, that is to say, became ruler of the year 
of the united moon-cow and sun-calf. The brothers of 
Arjuna, the star sons of Kartavirya, or Krituvirya, the male 
{virya) star-parent, the warrior-star Orion, slew Jamadagni, 
Rama's father, in revenge, and were all slain by Rama 
with his double axe Parasu, in the field of Tan-eshur, the 
home of the mud-god Tan, the centre of Kuru-kshethra, the 
land of the Kurus, where he filled the five adjoining (sa- 
manta) lakes called Samanta-Panchaka with their blood, 
that is to say, he became ruler of their year with its five- 
day weeks 2 . 

H. Emigration of the men of this age as told by their 

monuments. 

These Turano-Semitic seafaring races were the founders 
of the earliest Cyclopean architecture of the one-eyed {Cyclops) 
sons of the Pole. In this the walls were built of polygonal 
stones, accurately fitted together without mortar, as in the 
oldest parts of the prehistoric buildings of Tiryns, Mycenae, 
Orchomenos. They were also the builders of the earliest 
type of stone dwelling-house, modelled on the earth and 
wattle heehive huts of Phrygia, of which specimens are 

1 Rg. i. 164, 1— 10. 

a Mahabharata Vana (Tirtha-Yatra) Parva, cxv.— cxvii. pp. 354—362. 



262 History and Chronology 

found in the Picts' houses of Scotland and Ireland bur- 
rowed under earth mounds. The sacrificial pits which were, 
as we have seen, a distinguishing feature of their ritual in 
India, are reproduced in those in the palaces of Tiryns 
and Mycense, in the temple of the Kabiri in Samothrace, 
and in that of the Great Kabir near Thebes, while near 
the sacrificial pit at Mycense is a wall-painting representing 
a procession of ass-headed figures wearing gay garments, 
who are apparently votaries of the ass-riding Hindu Ash- 
vins *. This architecture also survives in that of the Nuraghs 
or circular towers of Sardinia, the zigurrats or sacred 
observatories of the ancient astronomers of the age of the 
tower of the Garden of God, the Hebrew Pen-u-el of the 
face (pen) of God, the Midianite tower of Zibah and Zal- 
mana, which, with the booths (saknt) of Succoth, the place 
of booths, were destroyed by Gideon, who cut down the 
Asherah, or divine pillars, and overthrew the altar of Baal, 
that of this cycle age, and substituted the worship of the 
Ephod 2 . This was the garment of the prophetic priest 
of the spoken oracle, who was inspired by the Bhang or 
Hashish {Cannabis Indicd) which succeeded the intoxicat- 
ing drink of this epoch, and which is said in the Zenda- 
vesta to have taught the divine law to Hvogvi or Shu-gvi, 
the coming-bird (S/iu), the wife of Zarathustra, and to his 
priests, who wore the Chista or ephod 3. These Nuraghs 
were built by the Turano-Semites from the East, who settled 
in Sardinia, under the lead of Sardis, called on Sardinian 
coins Sard Pater. His name, which was also that of the 
capital of Lydia, the home of the Tursena, is said by 
Xanthus to mean " a year," and it is allied to the Sanskrit 
Sharad, the autumnal equinox, the Armenian Sard, the 
Persian Sal, a year 4. 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. pp. 121, 223, v. 1 36, 137. 
- Judges, vi. 25—32, viii. 1—29. 

3 Darmesteter, Zeudavesta Din Yashl, 15, 16, 17; S.B.E., vol. xxiii. pp. 
267, 26S. 

4 Rawlinson, Herodotus, vol. i. p. 150, note 7. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 263 

This year-god of the autumnal equinox was the son of 
Makaris, Baal Makar, the god of the lunar sickle, the 
Phoenician Melkarth, or Herakles, and he was the Herakles 
Sandan of the unsexed male and female priests x . He 
was assisted by Iolaus, the Phoenician Baal Iol, the chario- 
teer of Herakles, who was the first of the five Dactyls or 
finger-gods, the first victors of the Olympian games of Elis, 
who, with Iasius, Kastor, Poludeukes and Herakles, won 
all the contests at the first festival : Iolaus winning the 
chariot-race as the leader of the year; Iasius the horse-race ; 
Kastor the foot-race ; Poludeukes the boxing match ; and 
Herakles, the cycle-sun-god, the wrestling and pancratium. 
They were originally the five Idaean Dactyls of the early 
five-days week who guarded the infant Zeus Itanos, the 
son of Rhea, at Ida in Crete. They are called by Pausanias 
Herakles, Pseonseus (the healer Paion), Epimedes, Iasius, and 
Idas 2 . 

These ancient builders who measured their year by the 
cycle beginning at the autumnal equinox, and led this 
emigration from East to West, were those who set their 
cities on a hill, and made the Akropolis on its summit 
the centre of the city, as in the cities of Orchomenos, Tiryns, 
Mycenae and Athens. This Phoenician Greek type is that 
which was transferred by these emigrants to Etruria, where 
Fiesole (Fcssulaz), Arezzo (Arretium), Cortona, Chiusi 
(Clusium), Volterra and Perugia all stand on hills, and are 
surrounded by walls of Cyclopean architecture. Each of 
these also marks its independent origin as the ruler of 
the province of which it is the centre by the ceremony of 
lighting the year's fires at the national city feast held on 
their New Year's Day. This is at Volterra, as I learnt by 
inquiry in the town, the 20th of September, or the day of 
the autumnal equinox. In most of these cities the rocks 

1 Fvaser, Pausanias, x. 17, 1—4, vol. i. p. 523, v. pp. 320, 322; Movers, 
Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap. xi. pp. 417 — 421. 

2 Ibid., v. 7, 4, S, 1, x. 17, 4, vol. i. pp. 245, 247, 523, vol. v. p. 323; 
Movers, Die Phonizicr, vol. i. chap. xi. p. 435. 



2 ^4 History and Chronology 

forming the hills on which they are built supplied materials 
for the walls, but the hill of Perugia, rising 1,700 feet above 
the sea, is a gravel deposit from the neighbouring Tiber, 
and the stones for its walls, some of which are of enormous 
size, must have been brought from quarries at a distance 
and carried up the hill. 

These immigrants also introduced into Etruria the cham- 
bered tombs which reproduce those of Bahrein on the Persian 
Gulf, called the Mounds of Ali, where one of these mound- 
tombs, thirty-five feet high, seventy-six feet in diameter, and 
one hundred and fifty-two paces in circumference, was opened 
by Mr. Bent \ It contained in one chamber the bones of 
a horse, and in that below it unburnt human bones. The 
builders of these tombs took the pattern to Asia Minor, 
where it appears in the tomb of Midas and those adjoining 
it, one of which is an exact representation of a Phrygian 
peasants cottage. There are similar tombs also at Dorylaum 
in Phrygia, on the Sangarius, and others pierced in the rocks 
of the Taurus range in Cilicia \ It is with tombs like these 
that the hills on which Chiusi stands and those in its imme- 
diate neighbourhood are honeycombed, the tombs in one 
hill, the Poggio Gajella, rising in successive stories from the 
bottom to the top. One of the most remarkable of the 
tombs at Chiusi is that called the Deposito della Scimia, 
or the tomb of the Ape. It is a collection of chambers 
hollowed in the tufa of which the hill is made, and closed 
by a tufa door. Each chamber is provided with three stone 
beds, each with its stone pillow, on which the dead were laid 
in their last sleep, the burial taking place before the intro- 
duction of the custom of burning the dead in the Bronze 
Age. Above each of these is a picture painted in outlines 
of red antimony. The most interesting of these is that 
which gives its name to the tomb, and which represents 
the dead man taking leave of his relatives on earth and 

1 Bent, Southern Arabia, chap, i. pp. 24—28. 

2 Leake, Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor, pp. 20 ff., 106, 107, 



of the Myth-Making Age. 265 

riding on the horse of death to the underworld. There he 
meets the king of the dead, behind whom is the ape-god, 
the god Kapi of India, the wise ape who is his inspiring 
genius. These same people also brought with them from 
the East the Dardanian Apollo, the god of Troy and of 
Larissa in the Troad, called by Homer the capital of the 
Trojan Pelasgi 1 . These Pelasgi Dardanians were allied to 
the men of the same race in Thessaly, where there is another 
Larissa, meaning perhaps the city of the Lares or ancestral 
spirits. Their Apollo was, as Plato tells us in the Cratylus, 
the god \47tAcu? 2 , that is the Etrurian Aplu, the Semitic 
Abel or Ablu the son. But this Apollo of the Troad was, 
according to Homer 3, Apollo Smintheus, or Apollo the mouse 
(<7/*tWo9), which was, according to Isaiah, eaten at their annual 
festivals by the ancient Semites 4 as the devouring-god of 
time. It is this god which we find holding a conspicuous 
place as a year-god in one of the most remarkable historical 
monuments of Etruria. This is the sacred ship found in the 
tomb of a warrior High-Priest of Vetulonia, whose ashes 
were, like those of Hector in the Iliad, enclosed in a golden 
urn covered with purple cloths 5. The ship is a Phoenician 
barque, and is evidently a religious ark, the ship in which 
the national gods were carried in all religious processions 
in South-western Asia and Egypt. Its contents tell us of 
the course of the evolution of religious belief in the creating 
year-god from a period beginning with the year of the deer- 
sun-god Orion. 

On its prow-deck is an image of the dwarf guardian-god, 
the Patoikos, who is depicted as a flower like that of the 
lotus springing from between two snakes coiled on a sub- 
structure of four pillars, which seem to represent the four 
divisions of the cycle-year. At the end of the prow is the 
head of the deer-sun-god with horns of nine points, the nine 

1 Homer, Iliad, ii. S40 — 843. 

2 Jowett, Plato, Cratylus, vol. ii. p. 228. 

3 Homer, Iliad, i. 38. 4 t s> \ xvu , 7< 
s Homer, Iliad, xxiv. 794, 795. 



266 History and Chronology 

days of the cycle-week, and on the topmost point of the 
horns two parent-snakes are seated. This head of the year- 
god is bound to this representative of the star-ship Argo 
by ropes, the year-days, which the mouse-god is gnawing 
from below, while on the top of the ropes the sun-lizard, 
worshipped by all Dravidians as the sun-god of marriage 1 , 
is lying. He, as we shall see presently, is the sun-god born 
of the Finn mother-goddess Kesari-tar, the daughter {tar) 
of the cauldron of life [kesari), after three years' pregnancy. 
Upon its head another mouse is sitting. 

In the centre-deck of the ship are two yoked oxen with 
wooden balls at the end of their horns, an ass or calf, a wild 
sow with two young pigs, a gelt pig, a ram or ewe, and a dog, 
the domestic animals of the age when the pig was a sacred 
animal 3 . It represents the Argo or mother-ship, the con- 
stellation which brought the twin-gods Gemini to Argos, the 
land consecrated to the holy fish, and which was carried as 
a sacred talisman by the emigrants who went still further 
westward to Etruria. 

From Etruria we can trace these Turano-Semite traders 
to Gades (Cadiz), where Herakles, their Ar-chal, slew the 
three^headed Geryon, the Phoenician Charion (Orion) 3. 
From thence they made their way by sea to Britany, 
where we find similar chambered tombs to those of Etruria 
and Asia Minor. There they have left in the megalithic, 
flat-sided stones, near Carnac, a series of stone calendars 
giving a history of their successive measurements of annual 
time. 

There are three of these stone calendars close to Carnac, 
One at Kermario, in which the stones are ranged in ten rows, 
while in that at Menec there are eleven, and at Kerlescan 
thirteen rows of stones. That these may be justly called 
calendars has been proved by M. Gaillard of Plouharnel, 

1 Beauchamp, Dubois' Hindu Manners •, Customs ', and Ceremonies \ vol. L 
part ii. p. 218. 

2 Milani, Museo Topografico Dell Etruria Vetulonia, pp. 28— »33> 

3 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. chap, xi. p. 437. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 267 

who has observed and studied them for forty years. He 
found that all the stone-lines run from South-west to North- 
east, and that the narrow ends of the stones point in this 
direction. At the South-west end of each series there . 
is an oval enclosure fenced in by stones, in which there 
was one stone used as a point of observation. Correspond- 
ing with this he found in each series a second stone standing 
among the aligned stones, but at right angles to them. By 
constant observations made with scientific instruments, M. 
Gaillard found that these two related gnomon-stones were 
so placed as to mark for an observer standing at the South- 
west stone in the oval the day when the rising sun sent 
its rays over the second stone so as to fall exactly on the 
line between the two stones. The days thus indicated were 
in the Kermario series of ten stones, the summer solstice 
and the equinoxes, in the eleven rows of Menec the sum- 
mer solstice, and in the thirteen rows of Kerlescan the 
autumnal equinox J . He also found that all the other 
surviving ranges of stones in Britany, similar to but much 
more imperfect than those of Carnac, were erected on the 
same plan. 

Also the examination of the entrance passages of the 
chambered dolmens used as burial-places showed that by far 
the greater number of these were directed towards the South- 
east, where the sun rose at the winter solstice, and in a de- 
tailed summary of the directions of the entrances of the 156 
dolmens in Morbihan,he states that 54 point either to the rising 
of the sun at the summer or winter solstice, and 98 to the 
rising or setting sun of the winter solstice 2 . These dolmens 
are all situated under a mound raised over them, like the ar- 
tificial hills of Shemiramot, to represent the mother-mountain, 
and the greater number belong to the Neolithic age in which 



1 Gaillard, V Astronoutie Prehistorique, i re Partic, Lea Alignments des Men- 
hirs dans le Morbihan Revue Mensuelle d'Astronomie de Meteorologie et des 
Sciences d'Observation pour 1897, PP- * — 39> 73- 

2 Ibid., Partie II. , Les Dolmens et coffres dc Pierre, pp. 125, 126. 



268 History and Chronology 

the dead were buried lying on their sides, with their legs 
bent and their knees raised to their breasts, and their arms 
similarly raised I . This is exactly the position of a foetus 
in the womb, which the partaker of the Soma sacrifice is 
directed to assume at his baptism in the Brahmanas 2 ; 
and it was one which would naturally suggest itself to 
the people of the cycle age of gestation, which was based 
on the year of the growing fcetus of ten lunar months. 
This is the same position as that in which the dead are 
found in prehistoric tombs in Egypt, and also in those of 
the Neolithic age throughout Europe 3. Also in Britany 
some of the skeletons have been exposed to the air before 
burial so as to clean the flesh off the bones 4, as is the custom 
among the Ooraons of Chutia Nagpur 5 ; and both animals 
and human beings were sacrificed at the funerals. 

All these facts prove that in Britany in the Neolithic 
age of the dolmens with internal chambers under hills or 
artificial mounds, these tombs were placed with reference 
to the rising or setting of the sun at the solstices, and that 
in Morbihan, of which Carnac is the religious capital, the 
greater number of the dolmens are oriented to the position 
of the rising or setting sun at the winter solstice, and a large 
number to the South-west setting points of the same sun, 
which marked the beginning of the earliest Indian year 
measured by the solstices. 

The stone calendars must have been arranged on similar 
principles, and they all have their observatories situated 
at the South-west, the home of the mother-bird of the years 
of the Pleiades and Orion, which began with the setting 
of the sun in the South-west. It is also clear that the 



1 Gaillard, L 'Astronomie Prihistorique, Partie ii. p. 112. 

2 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iii. 2, 1, 5—16 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 26—29 ; Max 
Miiller, History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, pp. 395 — 398. 

3 Petrie, History of Egypt, vol. i., Addenda, p. xix. ; Lubbock, Prehistoric 
Times, Second Edition, p. 148. 

4 Gaillard, L Astronomie Prihistorique, Partie ii. p. no. 

5 Hewitt, Riding Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 236. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 269 

arrangements of the stone avenues must, like the orientation 
of the dolmens, and the positions of the index-stones and 
observatories attached to them, have some connection with 
the reckoning of the year. We find in the Hindu ritual 
of the Soma sacrifice that eleven sacrificial stakes were 
placed outside the East side of the consecrated Soma ground, 
to which were tied the eleven victims offered to the gods 
of the eleven months of the year, which forms the subject 
of Chapter VI r . It is therefore probable that the rows 
of stones of Britany, which mark in other particulars 
their descent from Indian year reckonings, denote, like 
the Hindu sacrificial stakes, years of ten, eleven and 
thirteen months. 

This probability is raised almost to a certainty by the 
Linga stone altar in the collection of M. du Chatellier at 
Kernuz, near Pont L'Abbe, Finistere. Its form follows 
the rules laid down in the Hindu religious books for the 
making of a sacrificial Linga or stake. When I examined 
in M. du Chatellier's house this stone, which is nearly three 
feet high, and is of Breton granite, I saw at once from the 
designs engraved on its top and four sides that those who 
made it must have learnt the theology expressed in the 
engravings in India. 

On the top there was drawn the St. Andrew's Cross ^ 
of the solstitial sun, the sign of the flying year-bird beginning 
its flight at the winter solstice. On one side was a pattern 
of interlaced female Su-astikas ^ representing the annual 
course of the sun, beginning its journey round the heavens 
by going northward at the winter solstice. On the side 



next to this was the square of the eight-rayed star W -^i— 



\ 
/ 


/ 

/ 

l\ 



s 



representing the union of the St. Andrew's Cross of the 

1 See Plan of Sacrificial Ground, Eggeling, Sat. Brah. ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. 
P- 475- 



270 History and Chronology 

Solstitial V with the St. George's Cross of the Equinoctial 
sun J_, This square with the eight-rayed star inscribed in 
it was that directed to be marked inside the circling stones 
of the Soma sacrificial ground by the plough made of the 
sacred fig-tree, the Udumbara {Ficas glomerata), to which 
the oxen were yoked by traces made of three strands of 
Munja grass {Saccharum Munja), of which the Brahmin 
year girdles, denoting the three seasons of the year, were 
made. The guider of the plough in making this square was 
directed to begin at the South-west corner, where the sun 
of the winter solstice sets, and to mark from this point the 
two South and West sides of the square first. In drawing 
the transverse lines the Polar line from South to North was 
ploughed first, as'that round which the sun and stars revolve, 
that from the South-west to the North-east, marking the 
year of the flying sun-bird, second, the equinoctial West 
and East line third, and the North-west and South-east 
line last *. 

This sacred symbol told the history of the sun-year including 
that of the solstitial and equinoctial three-years cycle which 
preceded the year of the Ikshvaku kings, sons of the sugar- 
cane {iksha), which is the year described in Chapter VII. 
Upon this square the later brick altar of the sun-bird rising 
in the East, the successor of the sun setting in the West, was 
ordered to be built. This eight-rayed star of the solstitial 
and equinoctial year was called by the earliest Akkadians 
of Girsu Dingir the Creator, and Anu or Esh-shu, meaning 
god, and an ear of corn 2 . It was in Hindu mythology the 
symbol of the two united female and male Su-astikas, the 
solstitial star denoting the course of the sun going from 
South to North at the winter and from North to South at 
the summer solstice. The name embodies that of the god 
Astika, or rather, as he is also called in the Mahabharata, 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brd/i., vii. 2, 2, 3—14; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 326 — 330. 
• 2 Ball, ' Akkadian Affinities of Chinese. ' Transactions of the Ninth Congress 
of Orientalists, § viii., China, Central Asia, and the East, p. 685. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 271 

Ashtaka the eighth I . He was, according to one account, 
grandson of Yayati, and to another, son of the father ascetic 
of the Yayavara or full-moon ( Yd) sect, and of his wife, the 
sister of Vasuki the snake-god of the summer solstice. Both 
his father and mother were called Jarat-karu, or makers of 
time (faraf), that is to say the two seasons of the year, 
and their son, the eight-rayed star, was the high- priest of 
King Janam-e-jaya, the conquerer (fay a) of birth (fanam) 
in the sacrifice of the fire-altar, in which all the snake-gods 
except Takshaka, god of the winter, and Vasuki, god of the 
summer solstice were destroyed 2 . It is this history and 
that of the Su or Khu year-bird which explains the meaning 
and historical importance of the name Su-ashtaka, denoting 
the yearly course round the eight (ashtd) points of the 
heavens of the sun-bird. 

On the third side of this conical linga altar was a pattern 

of four leaves )Rr\ exactly the shape of Palasha leaves, 

arranged in the form of a St. Andrew's Cross ; and these 
leaves denote the Palasha leaves grown from the feather 
of the Shyena or frost (shya), which fell to earth when the 
year-bird of the winter solstice was wounded by the arrow 
of Kushanu the rain-bow-god, drawer (harsh) of the heavenly 
bow 3. On the fourth side, engraved in the form of a St. 
George's Cross, is the Palasha tree with its flowers and fruit, 
from which the leaves denoting the solstitial year fell. 

Round the top of these designs there runs a scroll of 
female Suastikas, and at the bottom one of snakes coiled 
in the form of the cross-bar of the male Su-astika r^^. 
This stone, sculptured in Britany, was found by M. du 
Chatellier at the end of an avenue marked by two rows of 
uncut stones, and it stood with the side marked by the 

1 Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, lxxxix. — xcii. pp. 265 — 272. 

- Mahabharata Adi {Astika) Parva, xlv. — xlviii., Iv. — lviii. pp. 132 — 140, 

I53—I59- 

3 Rg. iv. 27, 3; Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., i. 7, 1,1; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 183, 
note 2. 



2"J2 History and Chronology 

female Su-astika looking eastwards, about a hundred yards to 
the west of a dolmen under a mound, which contained cal- 
cined bones but only flint implements, and it was therefore 
a grave of the close of the Neolithic or the beginning of the 
Bronze Age, when bodies were burnt before they were 
buried. 

According to the rules for making a stone linga, given 
by Varahamihira in the Brihat-samhita, lviii. 8, the maker 
is ordered to choose a stone of the length he wishes, and 
to divide it into three parts. The top part is to be rounded 
like the top of a phallus, and the bottom to be square, 
exactly like the Breton stone, but Varahamihira says the 
middle part should be eight-sided I . This last is the figure 
made by changing the eight-rayed star in a square into a 
figure in which the bases of the eight triangles it forms are 
the sides of an eight-sided figure. It is this eight-sided 
figure which is that prescribed for the Yupa or sacrificial 
stake in the Satapatha Brahmana. As for its length, the 
Satapatha Brahmana says it may be five or six cubits long 
if the worshipper measures the year by five or six seasons, 
eleven cubits long if he measures the year-thunderbolt by 
eleven months, twelve if he measures it by twelve months, 
and so on through the series of recorded year measurements, 
showing clearly that the altar was one erected to the god 
ruling the year 2 . It was doubtless to this god of time that 
the earliest stone-altar or sun-gnomon-stone was erected, 
and similarly the original tree Yupa, the tree-trunk, denoted 
the god who measured time by the changes of the plant 
with its three seasons of winter bareness, summer leaves and 
flowers, and autumn fruit. The designs engraved on this 
stone-altar, when interpreted by the Indian ritual from which 
they were derived, say as clearly as written words could do, 
" This is the altar of the God of Time, who sent the sun-bird 
of the winter solstice to fly its annual course from South 

1 Sachau, Alberunl's India, chap, lviii. vol. ii. pp. 103, 104. 

2 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 6, 4, 17—27 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 126, 127. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 273 

to North and North to South round the Pole, and to supply 
the light and heat which nourish the tree-mother of life on 
earth, and enable it to bring forth its flowers and seed, the 
parents of future generations." 

The theology of which the creed is stated in the pictured 
writing on the Linga has in Britany examples of the still 
earlier phases of this belief when the altar was the sun- 
gnomon-stone, the solitary menhirs which abound in the 
country. The whole evidence proves that the maritime 
people who lived in Britany in the Neolithic Age, and 
erected there the menhirs, dolmens and stone calendars, 
were descended from the Indian Dravidian races mixed in 
their long journey from East to West with other stocks ; 
that they brought with them their national creed and social 
institutions as expressed in the ritual and customs of the 
successive worshippers of menhirs, the builders of sacrificial 
and burial dolmens, and of the people who buried their dead 
in the elaborate chambered tombs of the later age of this 
form of burial on the Persian Gulf and v\ Asia Minor, 
Etruria and Britany. 

A conspicuous place among the component members 
of this Turano-Semitic maritime confederacy must be as- 
signed to the two races of Goidelic and Brythonic Celts, 
the first of whom apparently belonged to the Gothic sons 
of the bull and wolf. They seem to have been the leaders 
of society in the palaeolithic stone age of menhirs, who 
looked up to the wise woman inspired by the bee and its 
mead as the divine prophetess, and believed in the river 
and tree-goddess-mother, Anahita and Rhea, as the queen 
of wisdom, from whom she derived her lore. These were 
the people living under the Amazonian rule of the queens 
of the Ionian races, who introduced into Greece the name 
yvvrj for woman, meaning the mother, the Gothic gino, the 
Saxon quena, our queen, which became in Sanskrit Jani. 
They were succeeded as ruling powers by Celts of Brythonic 
origin, whose language is spoken in Britany, and who 
changed the name of the mother, the queen, into the 

T 



274 History and Chronology 

Brythonic Pen T , and who called the Pole Star mother in 
India Tan Pennu, the mother-star. They gave the name 
of Pen-Samlath, the mother or face of Samlath or Semele, 
to the daughter of Kadmus, the man of the East (kedem), 
who became the mother of Dionysus, and who was both 
the bisexual Phoenician mother Shemiramot, and the 
Samleh of Masrekah, the Vine-land 2 , of the Edomite 
genealogy of Genesis xxxvi. 35, 36. This bisexual ruler 
succeeded Hadad, the sun-god of the pomegranate Rimmon, 
who was her father, and he was the conqueror of the Mi- 
dianites, and was thus the counterpart of Gideon, the 
founder of the worship of the Ephod, the sacred woven 
garment worn by the priests of these trading merchant 
mariners. 

The flow of this stream of Eastern immigration to the 
trading regions of the West can be traced still further in 
the Celtic mythology of Wales and Ireland, and especially 
in that of the latter country. A blurred outline of the 
history of the successive arrivals of the differing races of 
eastern invaders is to be found in the story of the never 
dying father-god of Erin Tuan, the son of Starn, the Pole 
Star, told by him to Finnen (the Finn) of Maige Bile, the 
plains of the hill of the holy-tree (bile) 3. First he came 
to Ireland with Panthalon, evidently a name substituted 
for the original title of the divine leader by a later editor 
of the history. He was the son of Sera, who may be the 
Wesh Ser, a star, and was accompanied by four and twenty 
couples, probably the four and twenty lunar phases of the 
earlier lunar year of Orion. Tuan was the only survivor 
of this first immigration, which may represent the first 
matriarchal races who came with Hu, the Mighty, from 
Deffrobani, Ceylon, and introduced the worship of Bran, 
the raven. Secondly, he became the stag-god, that is, the 



1 Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. i. pp. 2, 7. 

2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 54, note 2. 

3 Meyer and Nutt, Voyage of Bran, vol. ii., Appendix A, pp. 285 ff. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 275 

deer-sun Orion, of the sons of Nemed, the grove (nemeton) I , 
the Basque races of Asia Minor, born from the union of 
the Indian sons of the village grove with the Northern 
hunting-races. Thirdly, when these sons of Nemed died 
he became the wild boar sun-god, the boar of the age of 
the six-days week, whose slaughter was the first of the 
exploits of Krishna, the antelope sun-god, and of Arjuna, the 
Pandava god of the summer solstice. This was the boar 
who slew Adonis, the sun-god, born of the cypress-tree, 
and who in Celtic mythic history was killed on the last 
day of the year by Diarmait, the ruling year-god, husband 
of Grainne, the goddess of light, the female form of the 
Gaelic sun-god Grannos 2 , and therefore the equivalent 
of Suria, the sun-maiden of the Rigveda, who was brought 
in the car of the Ashvins, made of Palasha and Shilmali 
cotton-tree wood, to wed Soma, the moon-god 3. Diarmait, 
like the Semitic * Ram, was the son of one of two twins, 
whose mother was Duben. Their father was her brother 
Cairbre Muse, called the cat-headed Cairbre. Core, meaning 
the cropped, the father of Diarmait, got his name from 
his cropped ears, which were bitten off before his birth by 
Cormac his brother**. This incident bears a close resem- 
blance to the attempted supersession of Perez, ancestor 
of Ram, the sun-god, by his twin brother Zerah, before 
they were born as the children of the incestuous union of 
Tamar, the palm-tree, with her father-in-law Judah 5. 

The ruling men of this age of the boar-sun-god are called 
in Tuan's story the Gailioin, or men of the spear Gai, who 
were noted magicians 6 , the Fir Domnann, or sons of the 
goddess of the deep, Domnu, the Syrian goddess Derketo, 
and the Fir Bolg, the men of the Bag or womb, born after 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lecturer for 1886, Lect. i. pp. 100 — 102. 

2 Ibid., Lect. i. p. 22, Lect. v. pp. 506—511. 

3 Rg. x. 85, 9—20. 

4 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. pp. 308, 309, 313. 

5 Gen. xxxviii. 27 — 30. 

6 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1S86, Lect. vi. pp. 598 — 600. 

T 2 



276 History and Chronology 

ten lunar months of gestation I . These last claimed as their 
father Semion, the son of Stariath, the great sorceror Simon 
Drui, who made the revolving wheel of Fal, or of the paddles 
which enabled him to fly through the air. He is the II 
Vecchio Simeone Santo, the king of Wizards, of Italian 
popular mythology, who must be invoked by a Novena 
prayer to the wise gods, the nine-days week of the cycle- 
year 2 . He, as the turner of the heavenly time-wheel, was 
the counterpart of Ixion or Akshivan, the driver of that wheel, 
who was bound to it, and by its revolutions made the earth 
turn round ; and both the Greek Ixion, twin brother of 
Koronis, and the Irish wheel-magician Simon were the male 
forms of the bisexual goddess of this cycle-epoch, Semi 
or Shemiramot 3. Therefore these Fir Bolg, the bag-born 
sons of the wheel-god or goddess, were the men of the epoch 
of this cycle-year of three years, with its recurring periods 
of ten lunar months of gestation. These Fir Bolg are 
described by McFirbis, in his " Book of Genealogies," as 
having dark hair and eyes, slender limbs like those of the 
Hindu races, and short stature ; and Skene classes them 
with the Basque Silures4, the Aquitanian sons of the goat, 
the mixed race formed by the union of the short Finns with 
the Indian Dravidian farmers and the northern hunters. 
They are said by McFirbis to have lived in under-ground 
houses burrowed under mounds, like the neolithic long- 
barrow tombs 4. During the fourth avatar of Tuan he was 
the sun-hawk of the Tuatha De Danann, the sons of the 
goddess Danu and of the sons of Beothach, son of the 
prophet Iarbonel, that is to say he was the sun-hawk Adrika 
of the Mahabharata, the mother of the holy eels, the fish- 
parents of the sons of the rivers, the hawk-goddess Freya 
of the Edda, Hathor the hawk Pole Star mother of the 
hawk-headed Horus, the sun-god of the Egyptian Hor- 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi., pp. 596 — 598. 

2 Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 243 — 247. 

3 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. pp. 210— 214. 

4 Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, p. 78. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 277 

shesu and Zarathustra in his form of Karshipta, the hawk 
who knew the language of birds and divined by bird augury. 
They are described by McFirbis as tall, with golden or red 
hair, fair skin, blue or grey eyes ; and as the builders 
of houses they lived in huts or pit dwellings r . The battle 
in which these sons of the goddess Danu and the bird- 
prophet overcame the Fir Bolg, called also Fo-mori or the 
men beneath (fo) the sea (muir), the men of the South and 
the Fir Domnann, is said to have been fought on the last 
day of October, that is at the end of the Pleiades year, and 
in it the Tuatha De Danann were led by Nuada of the 
Silver-hand, the god of the lunar-crescent measuring the 
cycle-year, who was slain in the battle by Balor, leader 
of the Fir Bolg, and succeeded by Bres, meaning war 2 , who 
was the son of Brigit, the goddess Brihati of Chapter II. 
p. 71, and whose father Elatha came out of the sea and left 
a ring, the year-ring, with her at his departures. So that 
the birth of Bres was similar to that of the Indian Bharatha, 
the son of Sakuntala, who was, as we shall see presently, the 
sun-god born of the three-years cycle. Also this victory 
of the sun-hawk-god of the Tuatha De Danann introduced, 
as we shall see, the age of the sun-god Lug. 

In his fifth avatar Tuan became the sun-fish, the river- 
salmon who made the Queen of Erin pregnant, the god 
of the Milesian sons of Mile or Bile, who conquered 
the Tuatha De Danann, and who were the Brythonic 
Basques from Spain. They defeated at Tailltin in Meath, 
on the Boyne, these sons of Danu, called the men of 
the fairy mounds, the mound-builders of the Neolithic 
Age, who " had always three trees bearing fruit, one 
pig always alive and one ready to be cooked, and 
a vessel always full of excellent ale." Mile or Bile, 
the parent of these conquering Brythons, was, accord- 
ing to Professor Windisch, " a tree growing over a holy 

: Isaac Taylor. Origin of the Aryans, p. 78. 

a Rhys, Hibberl Lectures for 1886, Led. vi. pp. 5S6, 587. 

3 Ibid., Lect. iii. p. 275, Lect. iv. p. 478, note 3. 



278 History and Chronology 

well or in a fort," or, in other words, the mother-tree 
of the sons of the river-pool or the mountain-fort I . The 
sun-fish-god of these sons of the mother-tree and holy well 
was " the two undying fish which swim in Bowscale Tarn " 
of Cumberland mythology, the Akkadian fish-god Salli- 
mannu, the Hebrew Solomon, son of Bath-sheba of the seven 
measures, the seven stars of the Great Bear, the Makara 
or river-porpoise, the form assumed by Pra-dyumna, the 
especially (pro) bright (dyumna) god, son of Krishna, the 
year-antelope, the Irish sun-god Lug, born, as we shall 
see, in the three-years tower, and saved from the sea 2 , the 
Greek sun-god Perseus, who was an Assyrian god, according 
to Herodotus vi. 53, whose name means a fish 3, and who was 
drawn from the sea in a chest by a fisherman named Dictys, 
a net. 

I. Story of the tower of the three-years cycle. 

It is the story of the birth of this sun-fish-god from the 
tower of the three-years cycle, as told in popular mythology, 
that I have now to tell to complete the history of this epoch. 
Its earliest form is that of the Finn story which tells of the 
three years' pregnancy of Kasari-tar, the daughter of the 
kettle [kasari) 4. This was the Celtic Southern cauldron of 
regeneration of the god Dagda, the year-god Jather of Brigit, 
the Sanskrit Daksha, represented as a ram, the ram-sun of 
this epoch, and called Mendh Ishwara, the ram-god of boun- 
daries (menr), the Gond god Goraya, who was the father of the 
twenty-seven Nakshatra, the twenty-seven wives of Chandra 
the moon-god, the twenty-seven days of the month of the 
cycle-year S. He was the Greek god Hermes of the pillar 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. p. 588, Lect. i. pp. go, 91, 
Lect. ii. pp. 147 — 149, Additions and Corrections, p. 678. 
- Ibid., Lect. iv. p. 316. 

3 sElian, N. A., 3, 28. 

4 Abercromby, Magic Songs of the Finns, Part ii. ; Folklore, vol. i. p. 331. 

5 Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, s.v., Menr, a boundary, p. 249; Ma- 
habharata Adi (Sanibkava) Parva, lxvi. p. 189. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 279 

(epfjua), the Hermes Kriophoros who bore the ram-sun on 
his shoulders. This cauldron was the treasure of the Tuatha 
De Danann T , and it was made pregnant by the heated froth 
of the boiling sea of the South, churned by the revolving 
pole. At the end of the three-years period she gave birth 
to the sun-lizard, who comes forth to greet the sun in spring, 
and who was thus the symbol of the sun to the worship- 
pers of the gnomon menhir with its recording shadows. 
It is called by the Finns " the eye of Hiisi," the wooded 
mother-mountain. The race who adopted this story of the 
birth of the Southern sun of winter from the cauldron of 
regeneration of the South were the sons of the volcanic 
Mount Ararat, raised from the waves of the Caspian and 
Black Sea by the churning pole of the trident god of the 
year of three seasons to be the original home of the Kushite 
sons of Kur, the Kurds of Kurdistan, the Kauravya of India, 
born of the Kur or Araxes river, the Daitya or second 
mother-river of the Z endavesta. 

This story becomes in India that which tells of the birth 
of Bharata, who was, as we have seen, one of the triad gods 
Rama, Lakshman (the boundary laksJC), and Bharata, who 
were sons of the sun-god Raghu, called Dasaratha, or the god 
of the ten chariots {rat ha), or months of gestation. Bharata, 
who was the ruling god during the exile of Rama, son of 
Kushaloya the Kushite mother, was the son of Kai-kaia 
the Gond mountain {koi) mother. But in the form of the 
story which describes Bharata as the parent god whence the 
Kauravyas and Pandavas were descended, he was the son 
of Sakuntala. the bird {Shaknna) mother, the crow who was 
born of Menaka the white-robed moon, the measuring {men) 
goddess, the first of the six Apsaras, or dwellers in the 
watery {ap) abyss, the six days of the week 2 . Her father 
was Visvamitra, the friend {initra) of the village races {vishva) f 
the prophet-god of the Bharatas, who raised Tri-sankhya, the 



1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iii. pp. 256, 257. 

- Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, lxxii., lxxiv. pp. 213, 223. 



280 History and Chronology 

Ikshvaku king of the three {tri) numbers (sankka), to heaven 
as the triangle of the three weaving sisters, the three stars 
in the constellation of the Vulture now called Lyra, which 
are looked upon by the Chinese as the measurers of 
time. One of them is Vega, the Pole Star from 10,000 to 
8000 B.C. 1 . 

Menaka was brought to Vishvamitra by Maroti the tree- 
ape-god, and she gave birth to her daughter Sakuntala on 
the banks of the Malini, the mother-river of the Malli, the 
mountain races of North-east India. Dushmanta, he of the 
hard {dusk) sayings (mania), King of Ayodhya, in the age 
of the cycle- year met Sakuntala in the forest dwelling of 
Kanva, the bard of the new {kand) age of the lunar solar 
reckoning of time, whose disciples are the reputed authors of 
the eighth Mandala of the Rigveda, and she, after three years' 
pregnancy 2 , bore him a son called Bharata. , Dushmanta 
had left on his departure from Kanva's asylum a ring with 
Sakuntala, to ensure her future identification as the mother 
of his son, but she lost her ring in the river, and she and 
her son were disowned by Dushmanta, when she took him 
to his father. But when the ring was found in a fish brought 
by a fisherman to the King, Bharata was acknowledged as 
the royal heir 3. 

Bharata is the father-god of the begetting (bkrt) races, 
who looked on the father as the true parent and the son 
as the reproduction of the father born from the mother 
sheath 4. His children became the ruling race of Bhars, who 
as the wheat-growing building races succeeded the first millet- 
growing Gond Kushikas. It was they who were the tradi- 
tional rulers of all India, who built the city of Pampapura, 
of which the ruins remain in the Mirzapur district. Their 
totemistic descent is from (1) the Bans-rishi, the bamboo 
of the antelope (rts/iya) race, that of Vasu the rain-god of the 

1 Legge, The S hik King Decade, V., Ode 9; S.B.E., vol. iii. p. 363. 

2 Mahabharata Adi [Sambhava) Parva, lxxiv. p. 223. 

3 Ibid., Ixxi. — lxxiv. pp. 211 — 228; Kalidasa, Sakuntala, Act vii. 

4 Ibid., lxxiv. p. 226. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 281 

summer solstice ; (2) the Bel or ^Egle Marmelos, the tree, 
as we shall see, sacred to the sun Physician ; (3) the tortoise ; 
and (4) the Mayura or peacock. This is the form which, 
as we are told in the Jatakas, was that assumed by the 
sun-god in the heaven of the thirty-three archangels, the 
rulers of the year described in Chapter VI., with its eleven 
months of thirty-three days each x . This golden peacock 
is the Indian bird into which Argus, the hundred-eyed .South 
Pole god Argo, was transformed by Here when Hermes 
slew him with the Harpe or lunar crescent, thus introducing 
the cycle-year of the god of the gnomon-pillar (ep/ta) ruled 
by the lunar crescent. This transformation, accompanied 
by the introduction of the Indian peacock into Greek 
mythology, marked, like the introduction of the worship 
of the Indian sun-cock and hen, a fresh migration of Indians 
into Greece. In India the sons of the peacock were the race 
ruled by the dynasty of the Maurya or peacock kings, 
among whom the great Asoka was the celebrated ruler in 
days long after the remote period with which I am now 
dealing. He marked his traditional descent from the ruling 
races of the cycle-age of the ass-drawn Ashvins by adopting 
the ass as his cognizance. For it is this ancestral ass which 
he placed as a representation of his sign-manual on the top 
of the pillar he erected about 240 B.C. on the traditional site 
of the Buddha's birth in the Lumbini village grove. The 
ass has disappeared, but its presence is recorded in the 
inscription on the base of the pillar describing it as Vi-gada- 
bhi with the ass (gada) on it 2 . 

It was from these ruling Bhars that India took its ancient 
vernacular name of Bharatavarsha, the land of the Bharatas, 
and that its traditional historical poem was called the Maha- 
bharata or History of the Great Bharatas. 

These children of the cycle-year of the birth of Bharata 
were the race who disseminated the story of the birth of the 

1 Rouse, The Jalaka, vol. ii. No. 159, p. 25. 

2 V. A. Smith, 'The Birth Place of Gautama Buddha.' J.R.A.S.., 1897, 
pp. 618, 619. 



282 History and Chronology 

sun-god born from the river- eel in the tower of the three- 
years cycle in the Garden of God. This came from India 
to Greece by way of Assyria in the story of the birth of 
Perseus, the fish, from Danae, the Pole Star goddess, the 
female form of the god Danu, who was shut up in a brazen 
tower by her father Akrisius, the god of the mountain-top 
(aicpov), and made pregnant by Zeus in the form of the 
golden $ rain. This is reproduced in the Celtic story of 
Ethnea and her son Lug. Ethnea was the daughter of Balor, 
the giant-leader of the Fir Bolg, or men of the Bag, who 
measured time by the cycle-year. He had two eyes, one be- 
fore and one behind his head, the morning and evening star, 
and represented the sun-gnomon-stone, the Celtic form of 
Kastor, the Pole [stor) of Ka. Balor's Druid, the bird augur 
or divining-priest, told him his grandson would slay him. 
To make the birth of a grandson impossible he, like Akrisius, 
shut up his only child, his daughter Ethnea, in an almost 
inaccessible tower, called Tor More, at the eastern end of 
Tory Island, the island of the Tur, and set twelve matrons, 
the year-months, to guard her. Balor made himself ruler 
of the year by stealing the year-cow of Mackinealy, meaning 
the son of the Wolf's head, that is of the wolf of light, the 
sun-god of day. Mackinealy's Druid told him that the cow 
could not be recovered till Balor was killed by his grandson. 
Mackinealy was then conveyed to the tower of Ethnea by 
the fairy Biroge of the mountain as a woman hunted by a 
cruel tyrant, or in other words, entered it as the rain-cloud 
hunted by the storm, the golden-rain of the Perseus story. 
He made Ethnea the mother of three boys, the three years 
of the cycle. Balor put them in a boat, as Akrisius treated 
Perseus and Danae, and launched them on the sea to be 
drowned in a whirlpool, the revolving-cycle. In this two 
of the sons were drowned, but before the boat reached it the 
eldest of the three fell out of it and was saved by its fairy 
godmother, who took it to Mackinealy, who gave it to his 
brother Gavida, the smith, to nurse. Balor, thinking that 
all his grandchildren were dead, caught Mackinealy and cut 



of the Myth-Making Age. 283 

off his head on a large white stone, the sacred stone-altar 
of the Scandinavians z . 

The sun-god thus saved was the god Lug, the god of light 
(lux-lucis), whose name is connected with that of Loki, the 
fire-god of the Edda, and with that of the Lycian Apollo, 
the wolf (Xvkos) of light born of the wolf-mother on the 
yellow river Xanthus in Lycia, the sun-god of Western 
Europe and father-god of the Guelph or wolf race, one of 
whose chief shrines is Lug-dunum, Lyons, the fort {dun) 
of Lug 2 . 

In another story of his birth we find the three-years period 
of the cycle more distinctly shown than in that of Ethnea 
or Danae. In this he is the son of Dech-tere or Daeg-ter, 
the day-goddess, the sun-maiden of the Rigveda, who was 
driven in the chariot of the Ashvins, and who drove that 
of Conchobar, the year-god, as his charioteer. She at the 
head of fifty maidens disappeared from Emain, the capital 
of Conchobar, and returned every year for three years as 
wild birds who destroyed the crops. Conchobar and some 
of his nobles set out Southwards towards the end of the 
three years to find the birds, and came to a place where he 
was entertained by an old man and woman living in a 
cottage, Orion and the Pleiades mother. Bricriu, the Ulster 
genius of mischief, who was with Conchobar, going put at 
night saw a magnificent mansion which had been invisible 
by day, the night sky lit up by stars. He was met at the 
door of the palace of the stars Gemini by Dech-tere, who 
sent a purple mantle, the clouds of sunset, to Conchobar, 
and came to his bed, where she was delivered of the young 
sun-god Lug. For the original form of this god Lug, born 
from the three-years tower, we must turn to his Welsh 
counterpart Llew, the son of Arianrhod, the moon-goddess 
of the Silver Wheel, and Gwydion, the parallels of Dech-tere 

T - Rhys, Hibbtrt Lectures for 18S6, Lect. iv. pp. 314 — 318. 

- Ibid., Lect. v. p. 496, note 1, 497, 501, 502; Hewitt, Ruling Races of 
Prehistoric Times, vol. i. , Essay iii., p. 213; Miiller, Die Dorier, Book ii,, 
chap, ii., § 2, p. 218, Book ii., chap, vi., § 8, pp. 305, 306. 



284 History and Chronology 

and Conchobar. Llew was disowned by his mother Arian- 
rhod, who after having by various means retarded his 
recognition as the young sun-god, declared that no living 
woman should marry him. A wife Blodeued, meaning the 
flower, was made for him from flowers, the Greek goddess 
Koronis in her form of the flower-mother, but she was 
unfaithful to Llew, and attempted to murder him by the 
aid of her paramour. But the arrow with which he was 
hit, the year-arrow shot by Krishanu at the Pole Star 
mother-bird, only changed him into an eagle, which flew 
into Gwydion's lap, and he brought him back to his former 
shape. Llew then slew the murdering archer with his sun- 
spear, and Blodeuect was changed into the owl-mother-bird 
of this epoch. It is as a variant form of this avatar of the 
sun-eagle that Llew is represented as having been changed 
in the same place where he became the sun-eagle into the 
Aurwrychyn, or the beast "with the golden bristles," that 
is to say, he became the Ram with the Golden Fleece, the 
ram-sun-god of the cycle-year I . There are two accounts 
of the death of Balor slain by Lug : one that Lug slew him 
at the close of the battle in which he led the Tuatha De 
Danann, after Balor had killed their king Nuada with the 
Silver Hand ; and in this battle the Fir Bolg led by Balor, 
and the Fir Domnann under Indech, were the opponents 
of the Tuatha De Danann. In the other accounts Lug 
killed Balor in the forge of his guardian uncle, Gavida the 
smith 2 . 

This sun-god Lug or Llew, born as the sun-god of the 
cycle-year of the Hittites who wore the peculiar Hittite 
shoes, was also an excellent shoemaker, for it was by making 
leather shoes for his mother Arianrhod, the moon-goddess, 
that he first secured her recognition 3. He was also the 
patron-god of the Lugoves or shoemakers, mentioned in a 

1 Rhys, Hibberl Lectures for 1S86, Lect. iii, pp. 239 — 241, v. pp. 404, 4o5j 
423> 434- 

2 Ibid., Lect. vi. p. 587, v. pp. 396—398, iv. pp. 316, 317. 

3 Ibid., Lect. iii. p. 237. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 285 

Latin inscription found in the Celtic Uxama, the modern 
Osma, a town in Spain. He and his father Gwydion were two 
of the three golden shoemakers, the makers of the shoes of 
the sun of the three-years cycle J . This mythic occupation 
of the sun-god marks him as the god of the Hittite race, who 
became in India the Chamar workers in leather, whose tribal 
history, as we have seen, dates back to this cycle epoch. 

Another variant form of this age of the three years' 
imprisonment of the virgin sun-mother is that given in 
the historical story of Kamar-al-Zaman, the moon of the 
age, the son of the king of the Islands of the West, 
the Canary Islands, the crescent-moon-god of the races 
who began their day and year with the setting sun, and 
Budur, the full - moon daughter of the Eastern emperor 
of China. Her father built for her seven palaces, in which 
she dwelt till he, on her refusal to marry, imprisoned her 
in a separate building, where, like Ethnea, she was guarded 
by ten matrons, the ten months of the year of gestation. 
Kamar-al-Zaman, who also, like Budur, refused to marry 
the mate chosen for him by his father, was imprisoned 
for fifteen days, the length of a phase of the crescent-moon, 
on the same day as Budur. They were brought together 
in Kamar-al-Zaman's prison by two Ifrits, spirits of the 
dust {afar), male and female, the gods of day and night, 
who carried Budur thither. The night of their meeting 
was Friday, called in Arabic Juma, the day of meeting, 
or of the twins, the day sacred to the Northern mother- 
goddess Friga, the mother of seed (frzo), followed by that 
of Saturday, the clay of the seed (satur) father-god. The 
story says that this night was the first of Zu'1-kadah or 
Dhu'l-kadah, the month of the bird Zu or Dhu, and it is 
stated to have been a time of hard frosty weather. I have, 
in Chapter II. p. 54, shown reason to believe that this 
month at one time coincided with that of the first month 
of the Pleiades year, October — November, which would 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. v. pp. 424, 425, 541. 



286 History and Chronology 

not answer this 1 description. But from the story of Kamar- 
al-Zaman, which states that the first of Zu'1-kadah was 
a great state festival, apparently that of the marriage of 
the sun-god, which Kamar-al-Zaman refused to celebrate z , 
it would seem that in the age before the cycle-year the 
month beginning the life of the year-bird was transferred 
from its original place at the beginning of the Pleiades year 
to the winter solstice, when the national year-festival be- 
ginning Orion's year was held as a festival, which was con- 
tinued during the cycle-year. This was also one of the 
dates beginning the Jewish year, before they finally adopted 
the year beginning with the autumnal equinox. It is still 
kept as the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple, held 
at the winter solstice, the temple being the star-clad vault 
of heaven of Orion's year, the temple of the Hindu god 
Varuna. It was on the new year's day of the new cycle age 
when the sun-god to be born at the autumnal equinox 
was to' be begotten by the sexless parent-gods of this 
epoch, that the moon -gods who were to rule the new era 
were brought into the prison of the Garden of God, where 
they exchanged the ring of marriage of the ten-months 
year of gestation, but as each was asleep when the other 
took the ring they had no conversation together. In the 
morning Budur was taken back to her prison in China, and 
remained there for three years, till Kamar-al-Zaman was 
brought to her by her foster-brother Marzawan, the warden 
of the marches or boundaries, the boundary-star-god of 
heaven, the counterpart of Lakshman in the story of Rama. 
He, at Budur's request, went by sea to the Canary Islands 
to seek Kamar-al-Zaman, but he brought him back to China 
by land, thus completing the course assigned for the Southern 
star-ship Argo in the original legend of its voyage, com- 
mented on by Hecataeus. This makes the Argo sail from 
JEa in the East of the Black Sea, and to come down, how 



1 Burton, Arabian Nights, Tale of Kamar-al-Zaman, vol. iii. pp. 17 — 30, 36, 
43» 47— 5 1 



of the Myth-Making Age. 287 

it is not said, to the Indian Ocean, whereas the Argo of 
this story, steered by Marzawan, the star Canopus, starts 
from a port in China, in the Pacific, which was originally 
in the Indian version one in Ceylon, the island of Agas- 
tya Canopus. From this Indian Ocean the Greek Argo 
went to the lake Tritonis, in West Africa, in the South-west, 
where Athene, the tree-mother-goddess, was born. There it 
rested for twelve days, showing that the story was one 
describing the course of the year of the Phoenician Archal, 
and the three Indian Ribhus, as described in Chapter III. 
pp. 101, 102. This lake Tritonis was, in the story of Marza- 
wan's voyage, the Canary Islands, where he was shipwrecked 
and taken up, like Agastya, who drank up the tides "with 
his belly full of water." After his twelve days' rest at 
the court of Kamar - al - Zaman's father, the two escaped 
by land to China, where Budur broke the chain, which 
had confined her for three years, and married Kamar-al- 
Zaman under the condition that she, as the circling moon- 
goddess, was to return once a year to her father. 

J. The Indian and European land temires of this age. 

It is apparently to this age that we must refer the origin 
of the peculiar system of land tenure still existing in the 
Ooraon Lohardugga district, the especial property of the 
Chutia Nagpur Raja, held by him as lord paramount of the 
group of ancient kingdoms included in the area of the 
Chutia Nagpur Commissionership. During the growth of 
the Kushika rule, the civilised world surrounding the Indian 
Ocean was divided, as we have seen, into allied groups 
of provinces, formed from the union of the villages within 
the area of each province. It was the Kushikas or Haihayas 
who united the provincial confederacies into larger unions, 
ruled by the king of the central group of the union. The 
States formed on this system do not seem to have pos- 
sessed any standing army, except the internal police, the 
still surviving village Chokidars or watchmen, and the men 



288 History and Chronology 

of the villages in the frontier provinces, who were bound by 
their tenures to defend the country against any invading 
enemy. But when the Pre-Celtic races, who painted their 
tribal marks on their foreheads, and whose food was the 
parched barley of the North, overcame the Haiheyas, a more 
distinctly military rule was introduced, and the government 
was divided between the king, who was law-giver, judge and 
high-priest, and his principal subordinate, the Sena-pati 
or lord of the army (send), the Commander-in-chief, to whom 
the largest and most important of the frontier provinces was 
assigned. This in the Chutia Nagpur confederacy was 
Ram-gurh, now called Hazaribagh. It was under this semi- 
military constitution that the peculiar Ooraon land tenures, 
which bear so strong a resemblance to those of the Cymri in 
Wales, grew up. 

Among the Ooraons, as among the Goidelic Welsh, 
society was divided into four classes, (i) The royal class, 
including the families of the central king and his subordinate 
hereditary rulers of provinces. These had, as we shall see, 
special land rights, and the younger members of their 
families were entitled to grants of land for their main- 
tenance. (2) The class called among the Ooraons Bhun- 
hiars, the Celtic Uchelwyr, from whose families, among the 
Ooraons, were chosen the holders of the offices of the Munda 
or head-man, the Pahan or priest, and the Mahto or 
steward of the villages, in which they held ancestral rights. 
(3) The class of tenants who were members of the village 
community ruled by the three hereditary officials, who were 
the Vaishya of the later Hindu organisation, and resembled 
in their hereditary rights to the village lands the Celtic 
boneclegion. (4) The hereditary village servants, who de- 
veloped under Kushika rule into the classes of artisans and 
tradesmen, and who were under Cymri rule, the taeogion 
or eilltion, the un-free persons 1 . 



1 Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. vi. Ancient Laws and 
Customs, p. 191. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 289 

The king in each village of the central royal province 
of Chutia Nagpur, and the provincial governor in each 
of those on the frontier into which the Ooraon property 
law was introduced, was entitled to a large share of the land 
which was cultivated for him by the tenants who were not 
Bhunhiars, under the superintendence of the Mahto, and 
in payment for this service a special area of land called 
Beth-kheta is assigned to them as common property. This 
royal land is called Manjhus, and the crops gathered from 
it were stored in the granaries distributed over the province 
to supply food for the maintenance of the king and his 
followers during the constant progresses through their 
dominions, which they, as well as the Cymric kings, were 
obliged by custom to make. This royal land in the Cymric 
system was the king's Maerdref, under the superintendence 
of the land Maer, the Ooraon Munda. This consisted not 
of land in every village but of two trefyd or areas, each 
of 256 erwan or acres, that is of 512 erwan in every 
cymwd or province, the Hindu Parha. This was cultivated 
by the eitttion or taeoghs, the non-Cymric holders of the land, 
in each village, called Tyr Cyfrif or registered land, which 
was all held in common, and partitioned for cultivation 
among all the males of the village above the age of fourteen r . 
The register of this land was kept by the Canghellor or 
Chancellor, the Ooraon Mahto, who has become the Pat- 
wari or village accountant of Northern India, and the Kul- 
karni of Bombay and the Dekhan. These alien cultivators, 
who had occupied the country before the Celts, held in 
Wales the position assigned among the Ooraons to the 
tenant members of the village community who were not 
Bhunhiars, and both among the Celts and Ooraons they 
were required, as a service-rent for their land, to repair 
the king's houses, to erect temporary dwellings for him and 
for his retinue when they visited the cymwd during the 

1 Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, p. 18; Rhys and Brymnor Jones, 
The Welsh People, chap. vi. pp. 218 — 220, chap. ix. p. 400. 

u 



290 History and Chronology 

royal progresses. Among the Cymri the rule was that the 
king's sojourn in each cymwd was to be limited to nine 
days, the nine-days week of this cycle-year ; and during this 
time he was fed by the Uchelwyr, an obligation which does 
not entirely fall upon the Ooraon Bhunhiars, as they have 
only to supply firewood and such articles of consumption 
as were not furnished by the royal granaries *. 

Under the land system set forth in the Welsh Codes, the old 
village organisation which forms the basis of the Ooraon land- 
laws appears to have been replaced by one in which the cymwd 
or province was the unit instead of the village. Within the 
cymwd was the king's demesne and his waste land, and in 
it the Maer and Canghellor had the land attached to their 
offices, while the remaining area was divided into villages, 
some of which were occupied by the Uchelwyr, or free-tribes- 
men holding Tir-gwelyawg or family land, and others by 
the alien eitttion or teaoghs holding lands in common tenancy. 
Thus the Cymric cymwd with its king's land, the lands of 
the Maer and Canghellor, the villages of the free-tribesmen 
and those of the alien tenants, was an exact enlargement 
of the Ooraon village with the king's Manjhus land, the 
lands of the Bhunhiar families filling the offices of Munda, 
Pahan, and Mahto, with those of the tenant members of 
the community. But this Ooraon organisation, which included 
glebe land for the priest in every village, was also recognised 
in some of the Cymric villages where the priest occupied 
a position intermediate between that of a village servant 
and a free tenant. In the former capacity he had a contribu- 
tion from each plough of land in the district in which he 
was an authorised teacher, like the Hindu Prashastri or 
teaching-priest and the Ooraon Ojha, and as a free tenant 
the land attached to his office in his village 2 . That this 
glebe land was, in the Celtic villages where the pre-Cymric 



1 Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, pp. 157, 158; Rhys and Brymnor 
Jones, The Welsh People, chap. vi. pp. 220, note 2, 224. 

2 Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, p. 67. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 291 

organisation of the Picts was preserved, mixed with the 
land of the other tenants, like those of the Ooraon Pahan, 
is proved by the map of Hitchin in Hertfordshire, in Mr. 
Seebohm's " English Village Community," where the plots of 
glebe land are scattered over the cultivated area just as they 
were allotted under the original system of periodical redistri- 
butions of the land which was formerly customary throughout 
England, and survives in the yearly allotments of common 
grazing lands existing in many villages. In India, where the 
tenant's rights, under the customs of Chutia Nagpur and Chut- 
tisgurh, did not entitle him to the continued holding of the 
same fields from year to year, he obtained at the village dis- 
tributions a certain defined area of each kind of soil cultivated 
in the village, proportionate to the number of his plough 
cattle. Thus the owner of four plough-oxen got twice the 
area given to the tenant with only two. The whole system 
was based on the accurate discrimination of the different 
kinds of land in the village, and the measurements of the 
areas of each class of land. This has been from time im- 
memorial most carefully determined in India. But the 
oldest measurements there are not made, as among the 
Cymri, by linear measurements of areas'divided into plough- 
strips, but by an estimate of the quantity of seed that would 
be sown in each plot. The whole cultivated area is measured 
by the number of maunds (2 lbs.) that would be required 
to sow it, a different area being calculated for the rice 
lands and for those sown with dry crops ; and the results 
thus obtained, as I have frequently found by comparing the 
seed areas with those given by linear measurements, are 
surprisingly accurate. The existence of a similarly exact 
calculation of land areas among the Cymri is proved by 
the measurement of the cymwd, as defined in the Venedotian 
Code. The unit was the erw or acre of about 4,320 square 
yards, somewhat less than the acre of 4,840 square yards, 
and this was probably originally measured by the seed 
sown in it. There were four erwan in every tydyn {home- 
stead). Four tydenan or 16 erwan in every Rhandir {land- 

U 2 



292 History and Chronology 

share). Four Rhandiroed or 64 erwan in every Gafael {hold- 
ing). Four Gafaelion or 256 erwan in every tref {town* ship). 
Four trefycf or 1,024 erwan in every maenol. Twelve 
maenolyd and two trefyct for the king, or 4,608 erwan 
in every cymwd. 

Here the tref or maenol, the latter having the average 
area of an Indian village in Chuttisgurh, is the original 
foundation on which the subsequent provincial organisation 
is laid ; and the maenol or maenaur, the English manor 
or the area surrounded by stones (maeri), is the original 
Gond village with its carefully preserved boundaries, marked 
in Babylonia by stone boundary-marks *. 

The original pre-Celtic village system in England was 
apparently similar to that of the Ooraons, for there was 
originally in every village an area of land called the Thane's 
inland or demesne, which was cultivated for him by the 
tenants in the same way as the Ooraon tenants cultivated 
the " manjhus " land ; and in the village of Chippenham, in 
Wilts, we find a most interesting instance of the 16 carucates 
of this demesne land belonging not to the over-lord but 
to the village community as a whole. This corresponds 
exactly to the Gond custom of allotting one share of the 
village land to the head-man. Thus in Chuttisgurh, where 
the village lands are divided into five or more koonts or 
sections, one koont always belongs to the head-man. 
Another custom which shows the close affinity between the 
Ooraon and pre-Celtic English village is the custom of 
recognising the village servants as hereditary members of 
the community. These in Chutia Nagpur and Chuttisgurh 
sometimes have distinct allotments of land, but are more 
frequently paid by contributions of grain ; and in England, 
as in the village of Aston in Oxfordshire, we find fre- 
quently distinct fields set apart as those belonging to the 
village servants 2 . This village system was superseded by 

1 Rhys and Brymnor Jones, The Welsh People, chap. vi. p. 218, notes 1 
and 2, 219. 

2 Seebohm, English Village Community, p. 135 ; Gomme, The Village Com- 
munity, chap. viii. pp. 174 — 176, 163. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 293 

the Cymwd organisation, in which the villages held by the 
Uchelvvyr or free-tribesmen were separated from those 
of the Pict-tenants, who were aliens to the Goidel con- 
querors ; and we see this separation of tenures still subsisting 
in India in the divisions of villages into sections, one in- 
habited by the superior and the other by the inferior or 
original tenants ; and also in the conversion, almost uni- 
versal in some districts of the North-west Provinces, of the 
original communal villages into those held on the Jat system 
of Puttidari, in which the villages are divided into puttis 
or shares, belonging to the families descended from the 
founding-brotherhood, which exactly answers to the Uchel- 
wyr villages of the Cymri. Again in the Dekhan we find 
villages in which the part of the lands seized by the invad- 
ing Jat and Cheroo conquerors is partitioned into fields, 
called by the family name of the original appropriators, 
and held in hereditary descent by their successors, while the 
rest of the lands are held on the old communal system by 
the Mahrs, who represent the earlier tenants I . 

1 The whole system of the Munda, Ooraon, and Jat land tenures is ex- 
plained at length in Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii. 
PP- 90-95. 118— 123. 



CHAPTER VI. 



The year of the horse's head of eleven months 
and eleven-day weeks. 

THE period I have now reached in this historical survey 
of primaeval history is that represented in Indian 
mythological history by the worship of the horse's head, 
called in the Rigveda Dadhiank. This is the horse's head 
which was originally placed on the roofs of all houses in 
Gothic lands, after the sacrifice to Odin of the horse to 
which the head belonged. This is still carved in wood and 
affixed to the principal gables of houses in the Lithuanian 
and Gothic provinces of Mecklenburgh, Pomerania, Llineberg 
and Holstein I . This horse-sacrifice was also offered by the 
Mordvinian Ugro Finns of the Volga, the conquering races 
who succeeded the sons of the ass of the cycle-year, and 
first brought the horse to South-western Asia to supersede 
the wild ass, which, as we have seen, drew the year-car 
of the Ashvins, and which drew the chariots of the early 
Assyrian kings 2 . At the Mordvinian horse-sacrifice, accord- 
ing to a description of it by an eye-witness at the end 
of the 1 6th century, the Italian traveller Barbaro, the horse 
was tied by the neck to the sacrificial stake in the sacrificial 
pit, a survival of the ritual of the Pitaro Barishadah of the 
age of the Trigarta sacrifices, and killed with arrows. Its 
skin was then torn off and the flesh eaten. The skin, stuffed 
with straw, was lifted to the top of the sacred tree of the 
sacrificial ground, and adorned with rags and ribbons 3. The 

1 Baring Gould, Strange Survivals and Superstitions on Gables, pp. 38 — 41, 

2 Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, Egypt and Chaldasa, p. 770. 

3 Max Miiller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, vol. ii. p. 469. 



History and Chronology of the Myth-Making Age. 295 

head of this year-horse sacrificed at the beginning of the 
year symbolised its course, and was replaced at the end 
of the year by that of the horse sacrificed to consecrate the 
next year. This was the head found, according to the 
Rigveda i. 84, 13, 14, by Indra in the Sharyanavan, the ship 
(ndva) of the arrow (s/iarya), the arrow of the year of three 
seasons, marked by its feathers, shaft and barb. It was this 
new conception of the year, a revival of the arrow-year of 
Orion, which superseded and destroyed the cycle-year ; and 
it was with the bones of the head of the sun-horse Dadhiank, 
called in the Tait. Brah. i. 5, 8, the ten-head breaking 
(Shiro-bhidd) spells (mantrdh) of Atharva, Dadhiank's 
father, the sun-god of the Atharvans or sun-priests, that 
Indra slew the Vritra or worshippers of the encircling-snake, 
called the ninety-nine x . This number proves clearly that 
the year-god slain was the god of the three-years cycle, for 
the new year of the head of the sun-horse was, as we shall 
see, one of eleven months of thirty-three days each, and 
especially consecrated to the thirty-three gods ; hence the 
ninety-nine false year-gods overthrown by Dadhiank's bones 
are those of three years measured by the year-reckoning 
of the thirty-three gods of the new ritual order, that is the 
gods of the three years of the cycle-year. The field of battle 
was the centre of the land of Kuru Kshetra, where, as I have 
shown in Chapter II. p. 26, the world's tree grew up from 
the southern-mud (tan) to be the Pole Star tree of the 
Kurus, the mid-tree of the world's village grove. It was 
here where Parasu Rama, the god of the double-axe of the 
three-years cycle, had slain the Haihayas ; that Indra, accord- 
ing to the scholiast on the Veda, found the conquering 
horse's head near the sacred lake of Tan-eshur, that of the 
god Tan 2 . It was then consecrated to Staneshvara, the 
gnomon-pole of Sthanu, the leader, after Bhrigu their father, 
of the eleven Rudras, the gods ruling this year 3. 

1 Rg. vi. 16, 14, i. 84, 13 ; Ludwig, Rigveda, vol. v. p. 27. 

2 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, Staneshvara, p. 335. 

3 Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, lxvi. p. iSS. 



296 History and Chronology 

The Atharvans, priests of the sun-god of the horse's head, 
are the successors in the priestly genealogy of the Angiras 
and Navagvas, the priests of the nine-days week, and their 
genealogical line of descent from Bhrigu, the first of the 
Budras, is given in the Rigveda as that of the Bhrigus, 
Angiras, Navagvas, Atharvans I . That is to say, the first 
in the sacerdotal genealogy were the Bhrigus, worshippers 
of the household fire ; secondly, the Angiras or officers of 
burnt-offerings in the age of the six-days week ; thirdly, the 
Navagva priests of the cycle-year with its nine-day weeks ; 
and lastly, the Atharvans, the priests of the sun-horse, the 
fire-god Athar {Zend A tar), also known as Atri,the devouring 
{ad) three (tri) 2 . This name marks the year as descended 
from the early year of three seasons, which had been" that 
of the sun-deer. 



A. The genealogy of the sun-god with the horse's head and 
the ritual of Ids worsJiip. 

We find this line of descent expressly declared in the 
story of the sun-god Sigurd, the god of the pillar (urdr) 
of Victory (Sig), for it was from Hinda-fjall, the hill of the 
deer (hinda), that Sigurd started to run his annual course 
through the heavens on his sun-horse Grani, given to him 
by Grip, the seizing dog, the star Sirius ruling the year 
of the six-days week beginning at the summer solstice. 
His year's journey began after he had killed Fafnir, the 
snake-god of the three-years cycle, and gained possession 
of his treasures and the insignia of the sun-god of the year : 

(1) The helm of aweing, the night-cap of invisibility given 
to Perseus, born in the tower of the three-years cycle ; 

(2) the golden impenetrable mail worn by Kama and 
Achilles ; and (3) the golden year-ring, that given by Dush- 
manta to Sakuntala, and with which Sigurd wedded Brun- 
hilda, the Valkyr or bird-mistress of the springs {brunnen), 

1 Rg. x. 14, 6. 

2 Grassmann, Worterbuch zum Rigveda, s.v. Atri. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 297 

when he found her asleep on the top of the hill whence he 
was to set forth on his year's circuit of the heavens I . 

The Atharva priests of the sun-god, the third in succession 
of the Indian priestly lines of the Bhrigus, Afigiras and 
Atharvans, were the counterparts in Indian ritualistic history 
of the Jewish Kohathites or prophet-priests headed by 
Aaron, meaning the Chest, who was appointed to be the 
speaking-prophet to Moses, as the wearer of the priestly 
ephod which revealed the counsels of God 2 . Their pre- 
decessors were, as I have shown elsewhere, the sons of 
Gershom, answering to the Afigiras, and those of Merari, 
answering to the Bhrigus 3. 

These, called Athravans by the Zends, were the itinerant 
preaching-priests said, in the Din Yasht, to have been sent 
forth to preach the law of the holy Chest, the inspired 
teachings revealed to them by the Bhang or Hashish, of 
which I have spoken in Chapter IV. p. 171 4. These teachers 
became the national official historians, for, as we are told in 
the Upanishads, the Atharvas and Afigiras were the authors 
of the Itihasa Purana or national histories surviving in the 
Mahabharata, Harivansa, Ramayana, the Shah Nameh, the 
poems combined to form the Kalevala, the Greek and Roman 
historical myths, the mythological Sagas of Scandinavia and 
Iceland, and the endless series of local historical legends. 
We are told in Buddhist records that the knowledge of these 
national histories was an essential part of the instruction 
instilled into the mind of every Brahmin, and they were also 
known by every Druid 5. They were recited at the annual 
festivals marking the changes of the year, and especially 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., pp. 117 — 124. 
- Ex. vii. 1. 

3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Preface, pp. xv. — xvii. 

4 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Din Yasht, 17; Aban Yasht, 86; S.B.E., vol. 
xxiii. p. 268-74. 

5 Rhys David, ' Dialogues of the Buddha from the Nikayas, ' iv., Sonadanda 
Sutta, 114, where it is said that it was necessary for every perfect Brahmin 
to be a repeater of the legends, that is to know them by heart. Sacred Books 
of the Buddhists, vol. ii. p. 146. 



298 History and Chronology 

at the New Year's Festival, a custom which survives in the 
recitation of the Jewish Thora at the New Year's Feast in 
the beginning of Tisri (September — October) r . In the 
Brahmanas this recitation was ordered to be made by the 
Hotri, the pourer (hi) of the libations 2 , who was the Zend 
Zaotar, the chanter of the hymns, the speaking-priest 3. The 
root Hu, whence the name is derived, shows the connection 
of the office with the cloud-rain-bird Khu. He was the 
priest of the bird Karshipta, the sun-hawk, who brought 
the law of Mazda into the Garden of God, and taught the 
priests who divined by bird-augury to speak the language 
of birds 4. 

The year of the head of the sun-horse Dadhiank is said 
in the Rigveda to have been imported with the horse's head 
by the Ashvins, who taught in it the secrets of Tvashtar, the 
framer of the solstitial year of two seasons. The gods of 
this year were thirty-three, or three elevens, who accompany 
the Ashvins to drink madhu or mead s. Thus it was a year 
of eleven months, each of thirty-three days, divided into 
three weeks of eleven days, a combination of the five and 
six-day weeks of the years of two and three seasons, so that 
there were the same number of weeks in the year as there 
were days in the month. It was the year of the second, 
in point of time, of the Buddhist historical heavens, called 
the Tavatimsa, or that of the thirty-three gods ruled by 
Sakko, the rain (sak) god. They succeeded the gods of the 
first heaven, the Shatum Maharajika Devaloko, or the 
hundred angels born from the constellation Argo, the Shata- 
vaesa or hundred creators. 

This year became the Zend ritualistic year ruled by the 
" thirty-three gods of the ritual order, who are round about 

1 Max Miiller, Chandogga Upanishad, iii. 4, r, 2; S.B.E., vol. i. pp. 39, 
note 1, 40. 

2 Eggeling, Sat. Brak., xiii. 4, 3, 2 — 15 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 361 — 371. 

3 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendldad Fargard, v. 58; S. B.E., vol. iv. p. 
64, note 1. 

4 Ibid., ii. 42; West, Bundahish, xix. 16; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 21, vol. v. 
p. 70. s R g . i. II7) 22) i. 34) 11. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 299 

the Havani," the mortar in which the holy Haoma or Soma, 
the water of life, is mixed ; that is to say, the gods of the 
year regulating the storage of the life-giving rain in the 
mother-Soma-tree or plant r , the mortar of the earth's Soma 
or sap of life. 

We find further evidence of the existence of this year 
of eleven months in the eleven sacrificial stakes erected 
outside the east end of the Soma consecrated ground, 
to which the eleven victims sacrificed to the gods 
ruling the months of this year were tied ; the last of 
the eleven gods who ruled the close of the year was 
Varuna, and the first Agni 2 , the god of the national fires. 
These eleven gods are also invoked in the eleven stanzas 
of eight out of the ten AprI hymns in the Rigveda, recited 
at the animal sacrifices, and the twelve and thirteen stanzas 
of the other two hymns are addressed to the gods ruling 
the twelve and thirteen-months year. The first four stanzas 
of these hymns summon to the sacrifice the four seasons 
of the year: (1) Agni, the god of the sacrificial flame lit 
by the Samidhs or kindling sticks of the spring. (2) The 
wind-god of the burning West winds of the Indian summer 
called Tanu-napat, the son (napdt) of his own body, the 
self-produced or Nara Shamsa, praised of men, the fire 
burning on the altar. (3) The Id or Idah, the mother- 
goddess of the rains of autumn. (4) The Barhis or sacrificial 
seats of Kusha grass allotted to the Kushika fathers of the 
winter season. t The fifth stanza invokes the gates of the 
sacrificial enclosure, the two door-posts, and the two pillars 
in front of the Phoenician temples, the Semitic Bab-el or 
Jo-bab, the gates of God, the stars Gemini. The sixth, the 
twins Night and Day. The seventh, the two Hotars, the 
singers and speakers of truth, the two original seasons of 
the year, the pourers of libations and distributors of rain. 



1 Mill, Yasna, i. 10 ; DarmesteLer, Zeudavcsta Vendldad Fargard, iii, I j 
S.B.E., vol. xxxi. p. 198, vol. iv. p. 23, note 1. 

2 Eggeling, Sat. Brah,, iii. 9, I, 3. — 23 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 218 — 221. 



300 History and Chronology 

The eighth, the three mother-goddesses Bharati or Mahl, Ida, 
Sarasvatl, the three seasons of Orion's year. The ninth, 
Tvashtar, the creator of time measured by days, nights, 
weeks and years. The tenth, Vanaspati, the lord (pati) 
of the wood (vanas), the primaeval mother-tree. The eleventh 
summons all the gods who obey the cry of Svaha or Hail, 
and who were not invoked in the previous stanzas. The 
god left behind is said, in the Satapatha Brahmana, to be 
the god of cattle, Rudra, called Svishta-krit, meaning he 
who offers a right sacrifice. He is the god of the Northern 
immigrants, called the god who " rose in the North with 
his raised weapon," that is the god of the gnomon-stone x , 
the ithyphallic Hermes, which I have seen set up as a 
boundary - mark in Chuttisgurh, the facsimile of the 
phallic Hermse of Greece. This, the only god of those 
named in the hymns to whom animal sacrifices were offered, 
was the god in whose honour these hymns were composed, 
the sun-god of the Northern Asuras for whom the dolmen 
altars were built, and whose blood-stained offerings were 
not admitted into the sun-circle of the earlier parent-gods. 

These stanzas set before us a record of the past religious 
history of the country, beginning with the worship of the 
mother-tree, whence, in the ritual of this eleven-months year, 
the sacrificial stake was made 2 . This is followed by the wor- 
ship of Tvashtar, the Pole Star god of the stellar-year, who 
sent the Pleiades Argo and the sun-bird round the Pole as 
the heralds of the years of two seasons. After the mother- 
tree and the primitive gods of time and of the year of two 
seasons, came the three mother-goddesses of the three-seasons- 
year, the rain-guardians : the two Hotars, the twins Night 
and Day, and the door-posts of the gate of the Gardens 
of God, whence the four seasons of the cycle-year of Agni, 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., i. 5, 4, 1 — 5, i. 7, 3, 1 — 9; S.B.E., vol. xii. 
pp. 152, 153, 199, 200, note 2 — 202. 

s This is the Khadira tree {Acacia catechu) of which the fire socket and 
sacrificial stake were made. Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. s 
Essay iii., p. 161 ; Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 4, 1, 19, 22, iii. 6, 2, 12 ; S.B.E. , 
vol. xxvi. p. 90, note 5, 91, 151. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 301 

the god of the household fire, and the fathers of the Kushika 
race issue. The seasons of the Ribhus, the makers of the 
year-cow, were, as I have shown in Chapter III., three: 
spring, summer and winter ; but these were, according to the 
Rigveda, increased to four by Ribhuksha, the third Ribhu 
of Indra, the rain-god, who said " let us make four," thus 
adding to the original Vedic year the fourth, the autumn 
rainy season I . 

The sacrifice offered at the recitation of these Aprl hymns 
is, according to the Aitareya Brahmana, one to the thirty- 
three gods who do not drink pure Soma but the intoxicating 
drink the Sura, offered at the Sautramani sacrifice 2 , which 
is, as we shall see later on, a part of the ritual of the New 
Year's Festival of this year. In the orthodox Soma animal 
sacrifice the offerings of the eleven slain animals are divided 
into thirty-three parts, called fore-offerings, after-offerings, 
and by-offerings. The by-offerings are the hind-quarters 
of the victims divided Into eleven parts for the eleven gods 3. 
These offerings were made on the Uttara Vedi altar at 
the east end of the sacrificial ground. This was erected 
for this sacrifice, offered at the Varuna Praghasah, the 
festival of the summer solstice, and especially dedicated 
to Varuna, to whom, as we have seen, the last of the victims 
was offered. This special altar is placed on the top of the 
original Northern altar, covered with the Barhis or sheaves 
of Kusha grass of the Kushikas. It is roofed with branches 
of the Plaksha-tree {Fiats infectorid), the tree consecrated at 
Puryag, the junction of the Jumna and Ganges, the meeting- 
place of the Northern millet and barley-growing Gonds 
coming down the Jumna and the earlier dwellers in the 
land. On this altar the enclosing triangle surrounding 
the sacred fire on the navel is made, not as on the Kushika 
altar in the form of a woman, of Palasha twigs (Butea fron- 

1 Rg- iv. 33. 3. 4, 5. 9- 

2 Haug, Ait. Brah., ii. 2, iS, vol. ii. p. no. 

3 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 8, 4, I, II — 18, iii. 8, 5, I — 4; S.B.E.,vol. xxvi. 
pp. 210—212, note 2, 213, 214. 



302 History and Chronology 

dosa), but of Pitudaru wood (Pinus Deodard), sacred to the 
sons of the Northern mother Cybele and the pine-tree of 
Phrygia. Also the omentum, the membrane enclosing the 
entrails of the animals offered, is roasted at the Northern 
fire on spits made of the Karshmarya {Gmelina arbored) 
wood x . The ritual of the animal sacrifice as performed 
by the orthodox Vedic priests is admitted, in the Satapatha 
Brahmana, to differ from the orginal ritual of the Asuras, who 
instituted it and divided the whole sacrifice into portions, 
one for each of the year-gods, whereas only specified portions 
were divided in the later ritual 2 . There can be little doubt 
that, in the original sacrifice, thirty-three portions divided 
into three elevens were offered to the gods of the thirty-three 
days of the month and the eleven days of the week. 

The whole ritual tells us that those who instituted it were 
a Northern race who originally worshipped the pine-tree of 
Cybele, the mother-cave and tree, and looked on the god 
ruling the year as the sun-ram, born of the tree nurtured by 
the rains of Varuna. But in this sacrifice the original ram 
had become, under the influence of the ritual of the three- 
years cycle of the sexless gods, a wether. Hence a tuft 
of wether's hair with bdellium and fragrant reed-grass was 
placed on the altar, with pine-tree twigs forming the triangle. 
The Karshmarya-tree [Gmelina arbored) supplying the roast- 
ing, spits is also significant. It is the tree called Gumi, 
furnishing the sacred house-pole, Gumi Gosain, of the North- 
ern Males and their later congeners the Cheroos and Kaurs. 
Its wood will never rot in water, and hence it was valuable 
as ship-building timber 3. 

The eleven months of this year are also commemorated 
in the eleven stanzas of the Samidheni hymn sung at the 
kindling of the year's fires, and also in the Tristubh metre 
of the three (tri) praises (stub/i), in which each line contains 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 5, 2, 5, iii. 5, 2, 14, 18, iii. 8, 2, 16—28 ; S.B.E. 
vol. xii. pp. 392, note I, 393, xxvi. pp. 125, 194, note 1 ff. 
" Ibid., iii. 8, 3, 29; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 207. 
3 Clarke, Roxburgh's Flora Indica, p. 486. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 303 

eleven syllables 1 . These months are spoken of in the 
Akkadian hymn describing the combat between Tiamat 
and Merodach or Marduk, the Assyrian form of the son 
of la Silik-mulu-khi, meaning he who gives good to men, 
the household-fire-god, the Agni of the Rigveda, and king 
of the grove of Tin-tir, the Sarna of Babylon 2 . They are 
there called the eleven-fold offspring of Tiamat, the bird and 
dragon-mother (mat) of living things (tia), the original rain- 
cloud. And it was on the eighth and eleventh day of the New 
Year Festival at Babylon, the last day of the eight-days week 
of the year of fifteen months, described in Chapter VII., 
and the last day of the eleven-days week of this year, that 
Bel, the fire and sun-god, was said to sit on his throne as 
king of heaven and earth 3. 

The victory of Bel Merodach over the eleven -fold offspring 
of Tiamat is also told, under another form, in the Book 
of Esther. Esther is the Akkadian goddess Istar, who, 
in the Semitic ritual, has become, according to Dr. Sayce, 
the evening-star, the sun-maiden wedded to the horned- 
moon-god, the Ashtoreth Karnaim, that is of the double- 
horn^ She who is, in the Bible version of the story, niece 
of Mordecai, the god Merodach or Marduk, the calf of the 
double-horn, becomes the wife of the king of Shushan, the 
great Susi-nag, in place of Vashti, the female form of Vash- 
ishtha, the burning fire on the altar. It is she and Mordecai, 
the female and male form of the conquering sun and moon- 
god, who overcame Haman or Baal Khamman 5, the green 
pillar of Uzof, the goat-god, and his ten sons, the eleven 
months of the year, and crucified Haman, as the deposed 
year-god of an abandoned epoch, on the equinoctial cross 



1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 3, 5, 5, i. 4, 1, 7—39; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 96, 
102, note I — 113. 

2 Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic, chap. xiii. pp. 190 — 195. 

3 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1S87, Lcct. vi. p. 3S2J Ibid., Babylonians and 
Assyrians, chap, xi., Religion, p. 247. 

4 Ibid., Lect. iv. pp. 256, 257, note I. 

5 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 394 — 396. 



304 History and Chronology 

of the year-god of St, George's Cross *. Thus they brought 
in the year of the sun-god, heralded by the morning and 
evening stars. In his daily progress through the heavens on 
the cloud-sun-horse. 

The eleven months of this year became, according to the 
custom of ancient historical astronomy, star-gods, the eleven 
stars of the dream of Joseph who wore the coat of the many- 
coloured stars 2 . Joseph, whose name is a form of the 
Assyrian Asipu, or interpreter, was the eleventh son of 
Jacob, described in Deuteronomy xxxiii. 17 (New Version) 
as having the horns of the wild ox, the horns of Leah, the 
wild cow, those of the god of the year measured by lunar- 
crescents. He went down into Egypt, where these eleven 
stars are depicted in Vignette ix. of the Egyptian Papyrus 
of Ani. They there appear as the four sons of Horus, the 
four stars of the constellation Pegasus and the seven stars 
of the Great Bear, which, as we have seen, ruled the cycle- 
year. This year of Pegasus is that of the Akkadian con- 
stellation of Lik-barra or the striped-dog 3, the tiger-father 
of the Indian Mallis and Licchavis, the Vajjian sons of the 
tiger (vidghra), the rulers of India consecrated on a tiger- 
skin 4. As the year of the sun-horse it is the year of the 
fountain (^77777) or well, that of Hippocrene, opened by 
the horse of Bellerophon, the Phoenician god Baal Raphon, 
meaning the god of healing 5. He was the slayer of the 
triple-monster the Chimaera — with its fore-part like a lion, 
its middle-part with the head of a goat, and its hinder-part 
like a serpent — the god of the three-years cycle. The flying- 
horse which secured him the victory was the sun-horse, 
who by striking the earth with his hoof made the fountain 
of Hippocrene to swell forth as the first of the holy wells 
of healing distributed as objects of worship throughout 

1 Sachau, Alberuni's Chronology of Ancient Nations, p. 274. 

2 Gen. xxxvii. 9, 10. 

3 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. pp. 68, 69. 

4 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 3, 5, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 81. 

5 Berard, Origine ales Cultes Arcadiens, ii., Les Deesses, p. 1 16. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 305 

Europe and Asia, the holy well near which the Irish Mile- 
sians made their settlements. 



B. The Sun-physician. 

We see in this healing-god, the rider on the sun-horse, the 
prototype of Cheiron, the Centaur, half-man and half-horse, 
the king of the race of sun-worshippers who succeeded the 
Lapithae, the sons of the storm (Xair \al\aty), whose 
goddesses were the three Harpies, one of the emblems of the 
three years of the cycle-year. They were the gods of time 
who buffeted and pecked at Phineus, the sea-eagle (r^iz/t? 
or fyyvq), whenever he attempted to eat, and half-starved 
him, that is, interrupted his annual series of religious fes- 
tivals. These troublers of the mother-cloud-bird and dis- 
turbers of the yearly measurement of time were driven from 
their usurped office of time-rulers by Zetes and Kalais, 
the sons of Boreas, the North, the North-east and North- 
west winds, the winds of the sun of the summer solstice 
rising in the North-east. They sailed on the Argo with Jason 
the healer {las), a form of the Hindu Vivasvan, the god 
of the two (vi) lights night and day. The Harpies were 
sent to the Strophades or turning islands, those marking the 
solstitial changes of the sun J . This god, the sea-eagle 
Phineus, was competitor with Perseus, the sun-god born 
from the cycle-year, for the hand of Andromeda, the Phoe- 
nician Adamath, the star-mother of the red {Adam) race. 
He interrupted their wedding, and was changed by Perseus 
from the storm-bird of the South-west Monsoon into a stone- 
god, the gnomon-stone 2 . 

It was Cheiron, called by Pindar the teacher with the 
gentle hand (%et/j), and the tutor of Jason and yEsculapius, 
the sun-physician, who taught the use of drugs, oil and 
salves, and the practise of massage so extensively used in 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii. , Essay viii., pp. 190, 199. 

2 Ibid., vol. ii., Essay viii., p. 213; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive 
Constellations, vol. i. p. 49; Hartland, Legend of Perseus, vol. i. p. 3. 

X 



306 History and Chronology 

India 1 . The Centaur race introduced into Greece the use, 
of the medical febrifuge, called the Kentaurion of Cheiron 
(xeipcoviov Kevravpiov), for which Pelion, the mountain on 
which Cheiron dwelt, was famous 2 . 

Cheiron gave to Peleus, the god of the potter's clay (irrjkos), 
on his marriage as the Great Potter with Thetis, the Southern 
mother-goddess of the mud (thith), the mighty ashen-spear, 
the creating fire-drill and supporter of the heavens, the 
centre-pole of the world-house cut from the top of Pelion, 
which no other Greek, not even Patroclus who wore his 
armour, could wield 3, This spear was the stem of the 
world's ash-tree of the Edda, the ash Yggdrasil ; and the 
evidence thus furnished as to the origin of the story of 
the spear-bearing sun-god riding on the horse Pegasus of the 
fountains and wells proves that it was the Northern wor- 
shippers of the sun-horse who first brought to the South 
the knowledge of natural plant remedies, and of the use of 
the oil of Asia Minor as medical remedies preferable to the 
magical incantations and the system of cautery which formed 
the ground-work of medical practice in the age of sorcery and 
witchcraft. These Northern warriors were wielders of the 
spear of Cheiron, the Shelah of the Jews, the fire-drill of 
the revolving world's-tree which superseded the arrow of the 
first Centaur Eurytos, the drawer (epvco) of the heavenly bow, 
,the rain-bow-god, the Indian Krishanu, whose bow descended 
to Odusseus or Orion 4. Eurytos was the god who led the 
Centaurs in their battle with the Lapithse at the wedding of 
Pirithous, the revolving- one, the Pole Star god, son of Ixion, 
with Hippodameia, the moon-goddess tamer of horses. It was 

1 Pind., Nem., iii. 55 : — 

f3a9v/A7]Ta Xelpoov rpd<pe \i6iv(a 

"lacrov evfiov reyei Kal enenei/ 'AffKArjiriov 

rbv (pap/xaKwi/ 5i'5a|e /xaAaKoxsipa vofxov. 

Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 521—526. 

2 Mannhardt, Antike Wald und Feld ICultilr, Part ii. chap. ii. pp. 47, 48. 

3 Horn. Iliad, xvi. 139 — 144 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, 
vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 526 — 530. 

4 Homer, Odyssey, viii. 224 ff. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 307 

then that the nose and ears of Eurytus were cut off, and he 
was changed, like Phineus, into the gnomon-stone-god of the 
cycle-year x . 

The introducers into India of this new medical knowledge 
were the founders of the caste of the Telis or oil-men, who 
are called the Ekadas or worshippers of eleven gods. They 
brought from Asia Minor to India the holy oil called Til, 
extracted from the Sesamum plant {Sesamum Orientate). 
It is with this oil that every Hindu child is anointed after 
birth, and everyone, both men and women, anoint themselves 
with oil as a medical precaution against disease. In the mar- 
riage ceremonies of the Kayasth or writer, and the Kshatriya 
or warrior castes, both of which arrange their marriages by 
the help of the barber, who is, as we shall see, the priest 
of this age, the bridegroom and bride are smeared with oil 2 . 
But this use of oil does not occur in the marriage ceremonies 
of the Brahmins, nor is oil used in any of the ritualistic 
ceremonies enjoined in the Satapatha Brahmana, not even in 
those of the king's coronation, called the Raja-suya sacrifice. 
In this the king is anointed with holy water rubbed over 
him with the horn of a black antelope, and not with oil ; and 
this water, mixed with Kusha grass, fried rice and black 
Kesari millet, was poured on the king's head in the oldest 
references to the coronation ceremony of Rama given in the 
Mahabharata 3. The use of oil is ascribed to the ten-headed 
Ravana of the cycle-age and his co-adjutors 4, and the holy 
ointment in the orthodox ritual is ghi or clarified butter. 
ThejDnly oil which pure Telis can make is that extracted 
from the Sesamum, and the antiquity of the caste is proved 



1 Homer, Odyssey, xxi. 295 — 303 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, 
vol. i., Essay vi., pp. 555, 521. 

2 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Kayasth, pp.447, 448, vol. ii., 
Rajput, p. 188. 

3 Eggeling, Sat. Brd/i., Abhishechaniya, or Consecration Ceremony, v. 4, 
2, 1 — 4; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 94 — 96; Mahabharata Vana (Draupadi-harana) 
Parva, eclxxviii. pp. 820, 821. 

4 Mahabharata Vana {Draupadi- liar ana) Parva, eclxxix. pp. 826, 827. 

X 2 



3c8 History and Chronology 

by their worship of the eleven gods, and the Panch Pirs or 
five gods of the primaeval week, and the boundary-god 
Goraya, to whom the Dosadhs, their priests, offer pigs. Their 
mother-tree is the Chumpa-tree {Liriodendron grandiflord) , 
on which the bridegroom sits as the bride is carried round 
it, and the Chumpa flowers are those most prized for sacred 
garlands. These flower garlands are worn by the Hindus 
at all religious ceremonies, and are reminiscences of the 
ancient flower-mother of the year, who marked the year's 
circle by a perpetual succession of fresh blossoms, the crown- 
circlet or coronet of flowers of the Greek Crow-goddess 
Koronis, the sister of Ixion or Akshi-van, the turner of the 
heavenly axle, and the mother of ^Esculapius, the sun- 
physician. She was a variant form of the tree-mother- 
goddess Athene, whose name is derived from the same root 
as avdos, a flower I . The Teli legendary history tells how 
the first two Telis were made by the goddess Bhagavati, the 
tree with the edible fruit (bhaga), the nut or acorn-tree of 
Baal Bahal, spelt with an ain, implying the former gh of the 
god [el) Bagh, the Persian garden. She made them out of 
turmeric or yellow paste, the plant sacred to the Hindu 
Vaishya or yellow race, which is used to anoint Brahmin 
bridegrooms and brides 2 ; and it is mixed with oil and ghi 
or clarified butter in anointing those of the Kayasth and 
Rajput castes. The Telis are said in the Brahma Vaivartha 
Purana to be the eleventh in the lists of castes, and to be 
descended from the Kumhar or potters and the Ghorami 
or builders ; that is to say, they belonged to the races who 
looked on themselves as descended from the Great Potter, 
and who were the first builders of houses 3. 

The eleven gods of the Telis were also the eleven local 
gods of the Kandhs of Orissa, the conquering race of the 
Kui-loka or mountain-people, who trace their descent from 

1 Curtius, Griechischc Etymologie, No. 304. 

2 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Brahmans, vol. i. p. 149. 

3 Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 306 — 309; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, 
vol. i., Essay ii,, pp. 85 — 87. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 309 

the sword, and who sacrifice human victims to ensure good 
harvests, especially of turmeric, their most valuable export. 
They anoint this victim, after cutting his hair, with oil- 
turmeric and ghi, with which Rajput brides and bride- 
grooms are anointed, and they thus celebrate his marriage 
with the Pole Star goddess Tari Pennu, to whose home in 
the other world he is to be transferred 1 ; and this marriage 
is analogous to that of Peleus, the god of the ashen-spear- 
tree Yggdrasil, of which the roots reach to the Southern 
Ocean, the fountains of life, with the goddess Thetis of the 
Southern mud (thith). The age during which this year was 
the official year in India is that marked by the rule of the 
Kauravyas, who, in the war of the Mahabharata, led eleven 
akshauhinis, or monthly revolutions of the axle, against the 
seven akshauhinis of the 2 Pandavas, who measured time 
by the seven-days week of the seventeen-months year of 
Prajapati, and their thirteen-months lunar-year of exile, 
the subjects of Chapter VIII., who were also sons of 
Ambalika, the seven stars of the Great Bear. The rulers 
of the eleven-months year were, according to the Maha- 
bharata, the eleven great Maharathas or chariot drivers of 
the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra, headed by Duryod- 
hana the Kauravya leader 3. Their mother was Gandh.ari, 
the vulture, the daughter of Suvala, the circling {yald) bird 
(Stt), sister of Shakuni, the raven. She was the wetter 
[dJiari) of the land (gau), the goddess Dharti worshipped 
by the Cheroos and higher semi-aboriginal castes. She is 
the star Vega in the constellation of the Vulture, now Lyra, 
which was the Pole Star from 10,000 to 8000 B.C., and was 
wedded to the blind Dhritarashtra, the world's pole and 
spear, the central tree, meaning he who upholds (dhritci) the 
kingdom (rdshtra), son of Ambika, who was, as I have 
shown in Chapter III. p. 97, the Pole Star in Cygnus. In the 

1 Dalton and Macpherson, quoted by Elie Reclus, Les Primitifs, pp. 355, 
356 ; Risky, Tribes and Castes of Befigal, Kandh, vol. i. pp. 397, 398) 404. 4°S- 

2 Mahabharata Udyoga (Sanjayayaua) Parva, pp. 43, 44. 

3 Mahabharata Adi {Adivanshava tarna) Parva, lxiii. p. 1S0. 



310 • History and Chronology 

Northern land of Gandhara, the wet (dkara) land, the parent- 
home of the Kushite race, she gave birth to a hundred sons, 
the hundred Kauravyas. Their birth-place is the modern 
Kandahar on the Kushite mother-river the Helmund, the 
country of the accumulated waters, which descend to fertilise 
the plains of India in the Indus and the five rivers of the 
Punjab. 

They were born from an egg which lay two years in her 
womb. When produced the egg was, by the orders of 
Vyasa, the uniter, the constellation Draco, father of Dhrita- 
rashtra, sprinkled with the water of life. It then divided 
into one-hundred parts, each about the size of the thumb- 
the hundred Naga snakes. They were, according to the 
original form of the myth, the hundred children of the 
constellation Argo, called Sata-vaesa, or that of the hundred 
{shatd) creators, the Greek goddess Hekate, meaning a 
hundred. They were the snakes forming the Anguineum 
Ovum of the Druids, the tree {dru) priests of the Picts, the 
snake's egg hung up in the temple of Herakles at Tyre x . 
They were each put into a jar of clarified butter, and thus 
became the children of the cow-mother. They were kept 
covered up for two years, at the end of which time they 
came to life as a hundred sons and a daughter Dushala. 
The eldest of the sons was Duryodhana, who brayed like 
an ass at his birth, thus showing him to be the son of the 
cycle-year of the three-legged ass 2 , the four divisions of 
which, each of ten lunar months of gestation, marked the 
four years of the parturition of the Kauravyas, the two 
years during which they were in their mother's womb, and 
the two in the jars of clarified butter. The travelling car 
of Duryodhana was, as we learn afterwards, drawn by mules, 
thus showing him to belong to the race born from the union 
of the sun-horse and ass 3. 

The eleven ruling months of this year in India appear 

1 Macdonald, Druidism, Entyc, Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. vii. p. 477. 

2 Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, ex., cxv. pp. 328, 329, 337 — 339. 

3 Mahabharata Adi ( Jatugriha) Parva, cxlvh pp. 430, 431. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 3 1 1 

also in the eleven sons of the blind Dirghatamas, the long 
age (dirghd) of darkness {tamas), when the stars and moon 
were worshipped as the rulers of time. The mother of his 
eleven sons was Ushinari, sister of Shiva, the three-eyed 
god of the three-years cycle, and the eldest of these was 
Kakshivat, the socket (kakshd) of the revolving-pole of the 
earth, also called the son of Gautama, the father of the bull- 
race. He is said to be the father of Chandra-Kaushika, the 
moon of the Kushikas x . In the Rigveda the Ashvins are 
said to have made for Kakshivan a hundred vessels of Sura 
(spirits) to flow from the well opened by the hoof of the sun- 
horse 2 . In other words, he was the counterpart of the Greek 
Bellerophon, the Phoenician Baal Raphon. 

A further history of this age is given in the Mahabharata, 
in the story of king Kalmashapada with the spotted (kalma- 
sJid) feet, the ruling god of the starry heaven, son of Su-dasa 
He is called, in the variant forms of his story, Saudasa, the 
son of the ten (dashan) birds (ste), and Paushya, the god 
Pushan, who wedded the sun's daughter when the sun 
was in Cancer (Pushy a) at the winter solstice, as we have 
seen on p. 207, and became the god Push of the first month 
of the Hindu year. He ruled in the age of Vashishtha, 
the god of the altar-flame, and his hundred sons, the equi- 
valents of the hundred sons of Gandhari. The eldest of these 
was Shaktri, the wet (Shuk) god of rain, called also Shakra, 
Shukra or Sakko, who, at the close of the Buddhist age 
of the hundred Shatum Maharajaka Devaloko, became 
the ruling god of the thirty-three Tavatimsa gods. The 
star-king, Kalmashapada, the Pole Star god, became mad 
when he was cursed by Shaktri and deserted by Vishvamitra, 
the moon-god, who had ruled the cycle-year. That is to 
say, he became invisible as the Pole Star during the interval 
between the Pole Star in Cygnus in 15,000 B.C. and the 
Pole Star Vega in the Vulture, B.C. 10,000, when no Pole 

1 Mahabharata Adi {Sambhavd) Parva, civ. p. 316, Sabha {farasandha- 
badha) Parva, xxi. p. 63, Udyoga Parva, cxvii. p. 345, Sabha {KujasF/ya- 
rambha) Parva, xvii. p. 55. 2 Rg. i- u6, 7. 



312 History and Chronology 

Star was seen during this age of the year of the head of the 
sun-horse. It was in this period that the wandering Pole 
Star god devoured Shaktri and all the hundred sons of 
Vashishtha, and offered human sacrifices. Vashishtha, the 
god of the sacred-fire, then fled to the river Shata-dru 
(Sutlej) of the hundred springs, and only returned after 
twelve years, when Kalmashapada's wife gave birth to a 
son, Ashmaka, the god of the gnomon-stone (ashma), who 
was begotten by Vashishtha *, and born after twelve years' 
pregnancy. With this son was born the son of Adrishyanti, 
the rock (adrika) wife of Shaktri, called Parashara, the over- 
hanging (para) cloud, and Aurva, the son of the thigh (w.u)> 
the seven stars of the Great Bear, the thigh of Set, the ape, 
from which he was born. He was the god, as we shall see, 
of the next year of the eight-days week, the subject of 
Chapter VII 2 . 

The inner meaning of this mythic history appears in 
the story of Utanka, the weaver [ut a part, of Vd, to weave), 
the maker of the web of time. The first part of it is told in 
the beginning of the Mahabharata, and the last in the Ash- 
vamedha Parva, after the Pandava victory and before the 
birth of Parikshit, the circling-sun, the later development of 
the sun-god with the horse's head. Utanka was in his last 
avatar made by Krishna the god of the Utanka rain-clouds, 
which gathered before the birth of Parikshit, and were sup- 
plied with water by the hunter-star Orion 3. 

He first began his career as a year - god as one of the 
three disciples of Gautama, also called Veda 4 or Know- 

1 Mahabharata Adi {Chitra-?-atha) Parva, clxxviii., clxxix. pp. 504, 511, 
clxxxiv. p. 519 — 521. 

2 Mahabharata Adi (Chitra-ratha) Parva, clxxx. — clxxxii. , pp. 512-517. The 
identity of Aurva and Parashara, which is obscure in parts of the story where 
two mothers appear to be spoken of, is clearly shown in the end of clxxxii., 
where the fire cast by Aurva, also called Parashara, into the sea to destroy 
the world is said to have become the head of the sun-horse. 

3 Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anicgita) Parva, lv. p. 145. 

4 Mahabharata Adi (Paushya) Parva, iii. pp. 51 — 59, Ashvamedha {Anugita) 
Parva, lvi. — lviii. pp. 145 — 155. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 313 

ledge, when he was the god of the year of three seasons. 
But he became decrepit and lost his vigour during the cycle- 
year, and did not regain his youthful strength till he was 
wedded to the daughter of Gautama and his wife Ahalya, 
the hen, that is to the sun-maiden, who was wedded in the 
Rigveda first to Pushan, that is to Kalmashapada or Paushya, 
and afterwards to Soma, the moon-god r , here called Utanka. 
He agreed to' bring as a present to his mother-in-law the 
ear-rings of Madayanti, the wife of Saudasa, also called 
Paushya and Kalmashapada. That these ear-rings were 
the lunar crescents marking the course of the months is 
proved indubitably by their description, for they are said 
" to shine brightly at night, attracting the rays of the stars 
and constellations 2 ." Utanka, when he went to fetch the 
ear-rings, was met by a giant god riding on a bull to the 
house of Paushya, the, devourer of human beings and offerer 
of human sacrifices, ruling the first month of the Hindu 
year, beginning at the winter solstice. The giant on the 
moon-bull, the three-eyed Shiva of the cycle-year, made 
Utanka" eat its dung and drink its urine to sanctify him 
as the leader of the New Year of the moon-bull. Paushya, 
when his wife had given the ear-rings to Utanka, became 
blind, like Dhritarashtra and Dirghatamas, the ruling 
gods of the eleven-months year 3. Utanka, when he got 
the ear - rings, wrapped them up in the black antelope- 
skin of the antelope-sun-god. While he was eating the 
fruits of the Vilva or Arjuna-tree {Terminalia belerica) 
(whence Nala, in the story of Nala and Damayanti, obtained 
the powers of calculation, making him the god of a year of 
months) the package fell to the ground, and was picked 
up by the snake-god Takshaka, who took it underground 
as the sun of the winter solstice. Utanka went beneath 
the earth to recover the sign-marks of his year, as Orpheus, 
the Greek form of the Ribhus, went to Hades to recover his 

1 Rg. vi. 58, 4, x. 85, 9. 

2 Mahabharata Ashvamedha {Anugita) Parva, lvii. 25, p. 150. 

3 Mahabharata Adi {Paushya) Parva iii. pp. 54, 55. 



314 History and Chronology 

bride Eurydice, who, as the year-goddess, the sun-maiden, 
had been killed by the snake which bit her heel. He reached 
the nether earth, the underground mansions of the Southern 
Naga year-gods, by the help of Indra's thunderbolts aiding 
the revolutions of his staff, the fire-drill of the revolving-pole. 
On arriving there he was helped, according to one account, 
by a man with a horse, the god Indra, and according to 
another by a black horse with a white tail I , who suffocated 
the Nagas with smoke, the smoke of the incense offered 
to the god of the cycle-year of the ass, and that of the eleven- 
months year of the horse's head, and made them restore 
the ear-rings to Utanka. He, when he reached the upper 
earth, mounted the black horse to take the ear-rings to 
Ahalya. These became the ear-rings of Utanka's bride 
when he became the moon-god riding the black sun-horse, 
whose head was the Dadhiank of the Rigveda. That the 
whole story has a mythological meaning, giving the history 
of the reckoning of the year, is further proved by the sights 
seen by Utanka in the nether world, while waiting for the 
ear-rings. He there saw two women, the nights and days, 
weaving the cloth of time with its black and white threads, 
and the wheel of time turned by six boys, said in the poem 
to be the six seasons of the year, but who were originally 
the six days of the week, the six Aditya or beginning-gods 
of the Rigveda. 



C. The New Year's Day of the eleven-months year. 

Having thus shown, by this long chain of evidence, that 
the epoch of the eleven-months year of the black horse's head 
was that succeeding the cycle-year of three years, I must 
now proceed to show in what part of the year's circle the 
New Year's Day of this year of 363 days was fixed. 

The evidence as to the date fixed for the beginning of the 

1 Mahabharata Adi {Paushya) Parva, iii. p. 57, Ashvamedha {Anugita) 
Parva, lviii. p. 154. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 315 

Roman year of the horse's head is most conclusive I . It 
began on the Ides, the 15th of October, sacred to the god 
Fons, of the fountains, that is of the springs brought to 
the surface by the hoofs of the sun-horse of this epoch. On 
this day there was a horse race of two-horsed chariots in 
the Campus Martius, and the near-horse of the winning pair 
was killed, according to Timseus 2 . The tail of the horse 
was carried to the Regia, the ancient royal palace, which 
could only be entered by the Vestal Virgins guarding the 
fire on the national hearth of Vesta, in its central hall 3. 
This was the temple of the god Consus, the storing-god, the 
guardian of the harvested grain, and represented the central 
national house, the village hall of the Munda head-man, 
in which was the village fire tended by his daughters, who 
became the Vestal Virgins of Rome. 

The blood from the tail was allowed to drip on the hearth, 
and carefully kept by the Vestals for future use. The head 
was cut off and decked with cakes, like the head of the Mord- 
vinian sacrificed horse, and a contest for it took place between 
the men of the Via Sacra on the Palatine, who placed it, 
if they won, on the Regia as the gable-horse ; and by the 
men of the lower and older region of the Suburra, it was 
placed on the Turris Manilia, the representative of the 
Caer Sidi, or Turning-castle of the Pole Star age. 

This New Year's Festival of the 15th of October corres- 
ponded with the Greek festivals of the Pyanepsion of Apollo 
and the Oscaphoria, or bringing home of the grape or vine 
bunches (6W09), of Dionysos, a festival still celebrated in the 
Roman Campagna. They were held in the beginning of 
Pyanepsion (October — November), on the 15th of October. 
It also answers exactly to the Hindu New Year's Day of the 
Dlpa-vali, the circling (vali) lamps, the stars, which begins 
two days before the end of Ashvin or Assin (September — 



1 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis October, pp. 240 — 250. 

2 Polyb., De Bello Punico, 12, 46. 

3 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Sextilis, pp. 212 — 214. 



316 History and Chronology 

October), and the New Year's six-days festival lasts till the 
4th of Khartik (October — November) r . 

The god who began his year at this season is an altered 
form of the Dionusos Nuktelios, who went below the earth 
to seek for Semele (Persephone) at the winter solstice, and 
the year thus begun was totally unconnected with the 
solstices or equinoxes which had marked the course of the 
sun in Orion's year and that of the three-years cycle. 
Hence we can understand how the god of this year, in which 
the Northern human sacrifices of the cycle-year were con- 
tinued, was looked on as a mad god who despised and 
dishonoured the former gods of time. 

The age in which this year was the official year is called 
in Jain chronology that of Arishtanemi, the unbroken 
(arishta) wheel (nemi). For he, the son of Ugrasena, king 
of the Bhojas, was, under his other name of Kansa, the 
goose deposed and slain by Krishna, the eighth son of Vasu- 
deva, the ruler of the year of the next epoch, described 
in Chapter VII. The year of Arishtanemi was, according 
to the phraseology of the Jain Sutras, that in which the 
moon was in conjunction with Chitra, that is with the star 
Virgo, the Egyptian Min, the mother of corn and mother- 
star of the Minyan race. It was in Chitra (March — April) 
that this year-god was born 2 . That is to say, this year 
dates from the time when the sun was in Virgo at the 
vernal equinox, about 12,200 B.C., or about 2,000 years after 
the cycle-year, during which, as we have seen on pp. 207, 208, 
the sun was in Aries at the autumnal equinox and in Cancer 
at the winter solstice ; and this year continued to be the 
official year till about 10,000 B.C., when Vega became the 
Pole Star, and when the Pole Star, circled by the sun, again 
ruled time. Arishtanemi, the god of this year, is called 
in the Rigveda Tarkshya, the sun-horse, "who has begotten 

1 Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, p. 432. 

2 Jacobi, /aina Siitras, Life of Arishtanemi, s. 170, 149; S.B.E., vol. xxii. 
pp. 276, 271. The remaining incidents of Arishtanemi's life are taken from 
this Jain history. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 317 

from the water the five lands," the five provinces into which 
India was divided, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 199 *. 
He is mentioned in another hymn as a year-god with Indra, 
Pushan and Brihaspati, the Pole Star god 2 . His year's 
history is told in that of the twenty-second of the Jain 
Tirthakaras, his place being a multiple of eleven, and denot- 
ing the half-months 3 in his year. He was the son of Ugra- 
sena, king of the Bhojas, the army {send) of the mighty 
(Ugrd), the traditional cannibals who have become our ogres. 
He is called in the Rigveda Ugra-deva, the god Ugra, and 
invoked as a companion of the Yadu-Turvasu 4 of the cycle- 
era. His mother was Shiva, who here becomes a female 
goddess, and he is thus marked as a year-god descended 
from the cycle-year of the three-eyed god. He took the 
form of a living embryo in the womb of his mother Shiva, 
that is, was quickened five months before his birth. He was 

1 Rg. x. 178, 1—3. - Ibid., i. 89, 6. 

3 He was the duplicate of the eleventh Chakravartin or universal monarch, 
Jaya Victory. Jacobi, Jaina Sutras Uttaradhyayana, xvii. 43 ; S.B.E., 
vol. xlv. p. 86. 

4 Rg. i. 36, 18. The name Ugra, as that of the national god, seems to mark 
these invaders as the Akkadian Finns, allied to the races who still call them- 
selves sons of Ugur, and are known as the Ugro or Uigar Finns. These people, 
according to Dr. Sayce (Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lecture iii. p. 196), called 
Nergal, the god of the South, the king Nerra, and "the mighty sovereign of 
the deep," and also Ugur, the falchion or sickle-shaped knife, the Kherpe or 
Harpe with which Merodach slew Tiamat and Hermes Argos, and which was 
the weapon of Kronos. It was the lunar-crescent with which the father-god 
Ugur measured the year, and it is with this knife, the Ghurka-kukri, that the 
year-buffalo is always slain in India at the Dasahara festival. It has been the 
sacrificial knife since the days of Parasu - Rama, and this is the sword from 
which the Khands of Orissa, the human sacrificers, claim to be descended, and 
which I have seen set up as a god on a hill-shrine in Burwah in the Lohardugga 
District of Chutia Nagpur. These sons of the sword-knife are sons of the 
lunar-crescent or sickle. Thus these Ugro Finns of the Bronze Age called 
themselves sons of Ugur, or the crescent-shaped moon-knife. This, their father- 
god, was, as Dr. Sayce shows, the Phoenician god Sar-rabu, the great king, 
and he was worshipped by the Shuites on the western banks of the Euphrates 
as Emu, a name which is "letter for letter the same as Ammi, the national 
god of the Ammonites" (Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 196, 
note 1). 



3 18 History and Chronology 

begotten on the twelfth day of the dark half of Khartik 
(October — November), two days before the Bengal Kali 
Puja, the year-festival of this time-goddess, held on the last 
day of Khartik, when she is worshipped as the cannibal 
goddess, to whom goats, sheep and buffaloes are then 
offered I . His history, which has already stated that he was 
born in Chitra {Cheit) (March — April), then goes on to say 
that he was born on the 5th day of Shravana (July — August), 
a statement which must mean that he was then begotten. 

This is the date of the Nag-Panchami, the annual festival 
to the five snake-mothers. He installed himself as the year- 
god on the 6th of Shravana (July — August), that is the day 
after his conception, and probably that following the birth 
of the Naga goddess, his mother, who, like the early year- 
gods, conceived at her birth. His immaculate conception 
is probably referred to in the story of his virgin-wife Rajl- 
mati, who vowed virginity with him on Mount Raivataka 2 , 
and who was almost certainly in the original year-story also 
his virgin-mother. This installation took place on the sacred 
Jain hill of Girnar, about ten miles to the East of Juna or 
Yona-gurh in KathTawar, the birth-city of the Yonas or 
Yavanas, the growers of barley (yava). This is the Raiva- 
taka hill near Dwaraka, consecrated to Su-bhadra or Durga, 
the mountain-goddess, when she was at this Nag-Panchami 
festival carried off and married by the Pandava Arjuna, the 
rain-god 3. He was there worshipped by Rama, the god 
Halayudha, who has a plough [ha I) for his weapon (ayudha), 
and Krishna, called Keshava, the hairy-god. And it is this 
hill, which was sacred to Revati, the constellation Pisces, 
from which the year-sun-god was to be born. 

It was on the last day of Ashvin or Assin (September — 
October), that is on the 15th of October, the day of the 
Roman sacrifice of the sun-horse, that he attained perfection 

1 Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, pp. 430, 431. 
- Jacobi, faina Sutras Uttaradhyayana, xxii. 28 — 48 ; S.B.E., vol. xlv. 
pp. 115— 119. 

3 Mahabharata Adi {Sabhadrd-harana) Parva, ccxxi., ccxxii. pp. 603 — 607. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 319 

under the Vetasa or Banyan-tree [Ficus Indicd). Thus we 
see in this history of Arishtanemi, called the black-god with 
the belly of a fish, born from the fish constellation, that he 
was clearly the equivalent of the Roman October horse and 
the year-god of the Ugro-Finn conquerors of India. This 
sun-god riding on the black horse of night circled the 
heavens as the sun-star of day, going round his circuit in 
an unbroken ring of eleven months, divided into four seasons 
ruled by the four seasonal-gods invoked in the first four 
stanzas of the AprI hymns. And we find in the history of 
this year-god, reverenced as one of the founders of the Jain 
creed, most interesting historical testimony as to the funda- 
mental changes in religious belief made by the founders 
of the year. The Jains in their ritual and religious organisa- 
tion stand quite apart from the holders of the earlier creeds, 
who looked on the gods of time, the Pole Star, Pleiades, 
Orion and the Creating-rain-god, as the gods of villages, 
provinces or local national confederacies, who gave good 
crops, health and national prosperity to the localities they 
ruled — provided that they were propitiated by sacrifices and 
religious dances correctly performed in strict accordance 
with the ritual prescribed by the national elders and priests. 
In this religion the personal morality of the worshippers had 
no place, except as regarding the strict obedience required 
to the local rules of social organisation. But among the 
Jains, as among the early Hebrews, we find the first traces 
of the germs of the conception of personal religion and of 
the formation of a character by efforts in moral improvement. 
These appear in the belief that they could by asceticism and 
imitation of the lives of the saints of the community become 
individually holy, and attain to such a sensitiveness of con- 
science as to make it impossible for them to sin; an ideal 
infinitely higher than the conception of an unvarying obe- 
dience to imperious commands required from the slaves 
of a hard task-master. In contradistinction to this narrow 
view, which looked on fear of punishment as the only 
preventive of sin, the Jains believed that the lapses in 



320 History and Chronology 

moral progress, caused by yielding to temptations, could 
be atoned for and made less frequent in future by increased 
earnestness in ascetic discipline. But intermixed with this 
system of improving self-training there was the old trail 
of the notion of sacrifice, for the penances became, as they 
are among many of the Hindu devotees, a temporary or 
permanent sacrifice to God of the devotee undertaking a 
limited or unlimited life-task, such as that, common among 
pilgrims, of journeying to the shrine to be visited by pros- 
trations, in which the devotee lies down flat on the ground 
and begins his next prostration by placing his feet where his 
head was in the last. The belief in the possibility of self- 
regeneration was held in unison with the custom of national 
sacrifices, the most effectual of these being those in which 
human victims were offered. In these the primal belief in 
the creative power of the rain imbued with the germs of life, 
which was that of the first founders of villages, the sons 
of the mother-tree, had been changed into the creed which 
ascribed the origin of life not to the pure rain which ripened 
the seed and made it grow, but to the rain which had become 
the blood of the father-god. It was this blood transfused 
into the veins of the animal-father which became the vital 
seed making the father the transmitter to his offspring of the 
life-giving blood. This blood shed in human and animal 
sacrifices fertilised the earth and made it produce food, and 
hence arose the custom, followed in the Meriah human sacri- 
fices of the Kandhs, and in New Year animal sacrifices 
throughout India, of giving to each cultivator in the village 
where the sacrifice was offered a piece of the victim to bury 
in his field. It was these practices, and the alterations made 
in the dates of the local festivals by these sons of the sun- 
horse, that caused them to be regarded with horror by the 
votaries of the old faiths. Hence, in the Krishna legend 
the rule of the Bhoja king Ugrasena and that of his son 
Kansa, the Jain Arishtanemi, whose mother was Kalanemi, 
the wife of Shiva, the goddess Kali, was spoken of as that 
in which priests and cattle were ruthlessly massacred, and 



of t lie Myth- Making Age. 321 

the temples of the gods defiled with blood. It is the age 
called in the Zendavesta that of the usurpation of Keresani, 
the Krishanu of the Rigveda, the archer-god of the North, 
who said, " No priest shall walk the lands for me as a 
counsellor to prosper them, he would rob everything of 
progress I ." It was the rule of these ruthless Northern con- 
querors, followers of the Patesi, the bearded priest-kings of the 
Akkadians of Girsu and their prophet-priests, the preachers 
of personal religion, which was put an end to by the victory 
of the true and holy Haoma, the Soma god, who was wor- 
shipped, not with blood and libations of the intoxicating 
drinks consumed by his worshippers, but by the pure sacri- 
fice of the Tri-ashira, or three mixings of Indra, the sacra- 
mental cup made of Gavashir milk, Dadhyashir sour milk, 
Yavashir barley. This was, as we are told in the Rigveda 
viii. 2, 11, 12, first mixed with Sura {spirits), but afterwards, 
according to the ritual of the Brahmanas, with water from 
a running stream 2 . In this mixture the Dadhyashir, typi- 
fying the summer, is the ingredient of Varuna and of 
Dadhiank or Dadhikra3, the god of the horse's head. 

We find the religious history of this age of transition 
depicted in the ritual of the Sautramani, the New Year's 
Soma sacrifice of this epoch. It is said to be offered for 
the healing of Indra, the rain-god, whose divine power had 
left him at the end of the rainy season, during which he 
had completed his victory over Na-muchi, the antelope-god 
of summer, the Asura who does not (?ui) set free {much) 
the rain 4. He is said in this Satapatha Brahmana and 
Rigveda to have killed the god of drought by the foam of 
the waters, the wet wind of the South-west Monsoon S. He 



1 Mill, Yasna, ix. 24; S.B.E., vol. xxxi. pp. 237, 23S ; Hewitt, Ruling 
Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 462, 463. 

2 Kg. v. 27, 5, viii. 2, 7; Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 9, 3, 15 ff. ; S.B.E., 
vol. xxvi. pp. 232, note 2 — 238. 

3 Rg. iv. 38, 2. 4 Benfey, Glossary, s.v. , Na-muchi. 

s Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xii. 7, 3, 1—4; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 222, 223; 
Rg. viii. 13, 14. 

Y 



322 History and Chronology 

was healed, that is his power of bringing the rain-showers 
drained by the heavy falls of his rainy season contest with 
Na-muchi was restored to him, as we are told in the Satapatha 
Brahmana, by the thirty-three gods of this year I . Therefore 
it is clear that this sacrifice took place after the rains, like 
the New Year's sacrifice of the Roman horse, offered on the 
15th of October, or about the first of the Indian month 
Khartik (October — November), the day of the national Dibali 
festival, beginning in India the year of the Krittakas or 
Pleiades, and that on which Arishtanemi attained perfection. 
The Satapatha Brahmana does not give any exact date for 
the sacrifice which formed part of the Rajasuya or Coronation 
ceremonies 2 . It evidently became in later times one shifting, 
like the New Year's sacrifice to Rahu, described on p. 187, 
with the New Year's Day of the sacrificer's year, but it must 
be begun three days before the New or Full Moon ; and 
undoubtedly when originally instituted by the Asuras 
these three days were those before the New Moon beginning 
their year ; that is probably three days before the 1st of 
Khartik, when Arishtanemi or Indra, by his victory over 
the evil spirits who kept back the rain, became the conquer- 
ing god of the year, so that it is a counterpart of the Roman 
Equina held on the same date. 

During the first three days the annual offerings of a grey 
he-goat to the Ashvins, a ram to Saras vatl, the mother-river 
of the Kurus, and sons of the ram-sun, and a bull to Indra 
are made ; and the Sura or spirituous liquor to be drunk 
at the sacrifice and poured out in libations is prepared. It 
is made of stalks of Kusha grass and fruits of the different 
species of Baer shrub {Zizyphus Jujubd), which grows 
profusely over the sandy plains of Northern India, where 
it feeds, when placed upon these shrubs, the lakh insects 
producing the red lakh dye and the tusser silk-worms who 
spin the silk which was, as we have seen in Chapter V. p. 251, 



Eggeling, Sat. Brak., xii. 7, 1, 14; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 216, 217. 
Ibid., v. 5, 4, 1—35 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 129 — 138. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 325 

so much worn in ancient times by the people of the Punjab T . 
With these are mixed spices, parched rice, malted barley, 
and millets, the food of the Kusha grass fathers, and the 
first immigrant Gonds. Into the mixture thus made is 
poured the milk of one cow on each of the three days dur- 
ing which it is fermenting 2 . On the fourth day thirty-three 
libations of fat gravy, obtained from the cooking of the 
victims, were offered in bull's hoofs used as cups, and three 
cups of milk were offered on the Northern and three cups 
of Sura on the Southern altar to the gods of the six days 
of the week, and a fourth animal, a bull, was offered to Indra 
as god of the fourth season, together with a cake on eleven 
potsherds 3. 

Thus we see that this New Year's sacrifice of the eleven- 
months year of the sun-horse was accompanied by the same 
drunken orgies which marked the earlier religious festivals. 
Though the year appears in its Indian form to have been 
one of four seasons, it seems probable that it was originally 
like the Pleiades or Solstitial years, one measured by two 
seasons, with a sacrifice in the middle, the Vishuvan or mid- 
year sacrifice of the Brahmanas, answering to the April 
sacrifice at Rome of the unborn calf mixed with the blood 
of the October horse slain on the 15th of October, the day 
on which this Indian year began. This was held in Rome 
on the 15th of April, exactly six months after the October 
Equina. At the festival called the Fordicidia 4 thirty 
pregnant cows were offered, one for each of the thirty Curiae, 
the villages or parishes into which the Latin State was divided, 
and the unborn calves were torn from their wombs, and 
burnt by the Vestal Virgins. These ashes were kept, and 



1 Eggeling, Sat. Bra.lt., v. 5, 4, 22; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 129 — 138, xii. 7, 
I, 2ff. ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. p. 214, note 3. 

2 Ibid., xii. 7, 2, 9, xii. 7, 3, 5 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 219, 223, note 2, 224. 

3 Ibid., xii. 7, 1, 1, xii. 7, 2, 18, xii. 7, 3, 13, 14 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 219, 
note 2, 220, 221, 225, note 1, 227, 228. 

4 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Aprilis Fordicidia, p. 7 r > 
Parilia, pp. 79 ff. 

Y 2 



324 History and Chronology 

were at the Parilia or Palilia on the 21st of April mixed with 
the blood of the October horse and thrown upon the heaps 
of burning bean-straw, laurel and olive wood, from which 
the national fires were lighted on this New Year's Day. 

This new opening of the year, transferred from the 15th 
of October, marks a later chronological date for this year 
than that given by the traditional birth of Arishtanemi 
on the 5th of Cheit (March — April), and makes this New 
Year, which was still under the influence of Virgo, as one 
dating from the time when the sun was in Virgo, in April — 
May, the Hindu month Vlsakha. This was the month in 
which Parsva, the Jain Tlrthakara succeeding Arishtanemi, 
was born from the embryo quickened in Push at the winter 
solstice l ; also that in which the Syrian year, opening with 
St. George's Day on the 23rd of April, begun ; as well as 
the Gond year beginning with the Akkhadi, or ploughing 
festival, on the 18th of Visakha (Baisak/i). This was the 
official year beginning about 2,000 years after that of Arish- 
tanemi, or between 10,000 and 11,000 B.C., a year under the 
influence of Vega, the Pole Star from 10,000 to 8000 B.C., 
and the apex of the triangle of the three stars in the con- 
stellation of the Vulture or Lyra, called by the Chinese the 
three weaving sisters, who are said to measure time by 
" passing on a day through the seven stages of the sky 2 ." 

This New Year's Festival, described by Ovid 3, was origin- 
ally the rustic feast of the shepherds, held in honour of the 
bisexual-god Pales, the god of the chaff or husk {paled) 
of the seed-grain, answering to the rice-mother husk de- 
scribed in the Annamite version of the Cinderella story given 
in Chapter II. pp. 60, 61 4. This god of the double-husk is the 

1 J acobi, Jaina Sutras, Kalpa Sutra, Life of Parsva; S.B.E., vol. xxii. 
pp. 271, 272. 

2 Legge, The Shih King, Decade v., Ode 9 ; S.B.E., vol. iii. p. 363. 

3 Ovid, Fasti, 721—782. 

4 Pal in Akkadian ^.xMj^ No. 6, Sayce, Assyrian Grammar Syllabary, 
Assyrian Palu, means a year, or the Pudenda Muliebria. It is perhaps this 
word which became in Latin Pales, the grain-husk, and in Hindi Bar, Bar-as, 



of the Myth-Making Age. 325 

god of the two brothers Palici, worshipped in Southern Italy 
as the sons of Jupiter and Thalia x , the tree-mother, the 
twin cotyledon leaves of the parent-grass sacred to the god 
Sancus in Italy, and the Kusha grass of the Asiatic Kushites. 
The sheep-fold, sacred to the sun-ram, and its gates, the door- 
posts of the Apr! hymns, were decorated with green boughs 
and garlands. The sheep and the fold were sprinkled with 
water and purified by the shepherds at earliest dawn ; and 
the sheep were driven through the fire of bean-straw, laurel 
and olive wood to consecrate them to the creating-fire of the 
olive-goddess, the Greek Pallas, the Roman Minerva, the 
Egyptian goddess Min, the star Virgo. The shepherds then 
offered millet and millet cakes, milk and food offerings, 
to the wooden image of Pales, who is apparently the god 
of the Palladium, or wooden image of the goddess Pallas, 
a form of Pales. A prayer was then recited by the shepherds, 
with their faces to the East, asking Pales to bless them with 
good crops of grain and wool, and the increase of their flocks 
by the birth of healthy lambs. While saying this prayer 
they washed their hands in the morning dew and sprinkled 
themselves with dew from ta laurel branch. A wooden bowl 
of ancient form was then brought filled with heated wine, 
and after drinking this both men and women leaped three 
times through the mother-fire, exactly as the Dosadh priests 
do in their New Year's sacrifice to Ra-hu, the sun-god. 

In this festival we see the first beginnings of the belief 
in the baptismal virtues of holy water as more sanctifying 
than the blood-baths of the Phrygian ritual ; and also the 
worship of the rising-sun of day instead of the setting-sun 
and stars of night. It was followed by the Vinalia of the 
23rd of April, the day of St. George in Europe and Syria, 
called in Rome the festival of Venus Erycina. This was the 

the year, the Tamil Var-usham. Pal is a Finnic equivalent for bar or var, as the 
Akkadian Bil is an equivalent for Phur fire. Hence the goddess called Pallas 
was originally the mother-goddess of the year, and a goddess brought from 
the Euphratean countries to Troy, like Assaracus, the god of the bed Asurra. 
1 Virg. Alii., ix. 585; Macrobius, s.v., 19. 



326 History and Chronology 

Greek Erigone, priestess of Dionysos", who gave the first 
wine known to mortals to Ikarios her father. He was slain 
by the peasants with whom he shared it, as they thought 
themselves poisoned. Erigone was led to the corpse of her 
father by Maira, her dog, and hung herself on a tree. Thus 
the father and daughter, the bisexual-year-goddess Shemi- 
ramot of the three-years cycle, in which Dionysos Nuk- 
telios was born from the imprisoned sun-mother, were slain 
at the end of their year, and went up to heaven with their 
dog as the constellations Virgo, Bootes, and the dog-star 
Sirius x . This virgin-star-goddess is the Phoenician Erek- 
hayim of length {erek) of days, the goddess of health, who 
ruled both this year of eleven months and that of Arishta- 
nemi preceding it, which was also an eleven-months year. 
These two year epochs were those falling between the days 
of the Pole Star in Cygnus and those of Vega in the 
Vulture constellation, that is the period from about 1 5,000 
to 10,000 B.C. 

The sacrifice of the sun-horse, which began this year 
in Rome on the 15th of October, was in India, according 
to the Mahabharata, offered on the Full Moon of Cheit, that 
is about the 1st of April 2 , as the initiation sacrifice of the 
coronation of Yudhishthira ; but as the New Year's sacrifice 
of this year, ruled by the crescent-moon, it must have 
originally taken place at the New Moon, and it was trans- 
ferred to the Full Moon as a preliminary sacrifice to the 
dying year-god of the year ending at the close of Cheit and 
beginning at the New Moon of Visakha (Baisakh). This 
sacrifice as an offering preceding the new year beginning 
in Visakha, under the constellation Virgo, about the 15th 
of April, would therefore date from about 10,200 B.C. It 
was certainly one to the thirty-three gods of this eleven- 
months year, for we are expressly told that the horse was 

1 Berard, Origine ties Cultes Arcadiens, Les Deesses, pp. 148 — 150, Les 
Couples Divins. pp. 179, 180, Eratosph., Catast, Edition Robert, pp. 39 ff. ; 
Roscher, Lexicon, Art. Ikarios. 

2 Mahabharata Ashvamedha {Anugita) Parva, lxxxii. p. 181. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 327 

cut into pieces according to the directions of the Veda, that 
is into thirty-four pieces, and that the horse to be sacrificed 
was placed under the guardianship of Drupadi, the mother- 
goddess, daughter of the tree (dru) wife of the Pandavas I , 
who was thus, like Subhadra, the mountain-mother-goddess, 
made the bride of the sun-horse. She is thus marked as the 
star-mother-goddess Virgo, wedded to the Pandavas after 
they left the kingdom of Chaitra-ratha, the chariot (ratJid) 
of Chitra Virgo, under the guidance of the incense-priest 
(dJiumo) Dhaumya 2 . 

The ritual of the sacrifice of the sun-horse in the Ma- 
habharata is, as we shall see later on, compounded of various 
forms adapted to the fifteen, seventeen and eighteen-months 
years, described in Chapters VII., VIII. and IX., but the 
observation of the fundamental rule of the Vedic ritual 
that the horse was to be cut into thirty-four pieces, each 
containing one of its ribs 3, shows that it was originally a 
sacrifice to the thirty-three gods of this year and the sun-god. 
In the first form of the ritual of the sacrifice given in the 
Satapatha Brahmana, the horse, when led up, is addressed 
in a hymn of eleven stanzas sacred to this year, but the 
horse is not slaughtered according to the ritual requiring 
its jugular vein to be cut and the blood shed into the 
sacrificial pit, but strangled, and it is said that the verse 
18 of Rigveda i. 162, directing it to be cut into thirty- 
four pieces, may be left out, but the queen was placed, 
like Drupadi, lying down near the horse 4. 

The horse sacrifice of the Mahabharata was accompanied, 
like the Sautramani and Palilia festival, with much drinking, 
for we are told that both men and women were drunk at it 5. 
Hence it was offered before the days when high-caste Hindus 



1 Mahabharata Ashvamedha [Anugita) Parva, lxxxix. 2, 3, p. 224. 
- Mahabharata (Chaitra-ratha) Parva, clxxxv. pp. 520, 521. 
3 Rg. i. 162, 18. 

* Eggeling, Sat. Brah., xiii. 5, I, 16—18, xiii. 5, 2, 2 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. 
pp. 384, 385, 3S6. 

5 Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugila) Parva, lxxxix. 41, p. 227. 



328 History and Chronology 

became what they now are, strict teetotallers, who think it 
disgraceful to drink intoxicating liquor. It was not, as we 
shall see in the sequel, till the death of Krishna and the 
year-gods of the early ages of time reckoning that abstinence 
from drink became universal among the upper-classes, and 
was enjoined on all Buddhists, but not on Jains or Brahmin 
ascetics, unless we are to include this as one of the pro- 
hibitions covered by the rule that Brahmins were obliged 
to observe purity in eating x . Abstinence from intoxicating 
drink must also in Vedic times have been enjoined as a 
religious duty on all partakers of the orthodox Soma sacra- 
ment of the Brahmanas, in which the ingredients were mixed 
with water and not with the Sura or spirits of the Sautra- 
mani sacrifice. We shall see later on, in Chapter VIII., 
that this reformation dates after the seventeen-months year 
of Prajapati, inaugurated by the Vajapeya sacrifice of the 
chariot-horse race. 

D. The horses of the sun-chariot. 

An important question arising out of the year of the 
sun-horse is that connected with the j, belief, originating 
at this epoch, that the chariot of the sun was drawn by 
horses, and with the number attached to the sun's car. 
We have seen that in the cycle-year the car of the year-god 
was drawn by asses, and the change of the ass into the 
horse was one made by the Parthian cavalry, who introduced 
into Asia Minor, Syria and Southern Arabia the horses 
of the Ugrian Finn tribes of the Volga, who have always 
sacrificed horses. These became the horses of the Pandava 
sons of Pritha, mother of the Parthava or Partha, a name 
given in the Mahabharata to the Pandavas, and she was 
also called Kunti, the lance or javelin of the horse-riding 
Shambara. The horses which drew the chariot of Krishna 
were two, Saivya and Su-griva. The first is the horse of 

1 Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Introduction; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. xxii.; Biihler, 
Baudhayana, ii. 10, 18, 2; S.B.E., vol. xiv. p. 279. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 329 

Shiva, the three-eyed god of the cycle-year, the year-bull ; 
the second, the bird-headed ape, who married Tara, the 
Pole Star goddess in Kepheus I . These correspond to 
Vrishabha, the bull, and Shimshumara, the alligator, the 
constellation Draco, who drew the Ashvins' car bearing 
the sun's daughter to the house of Divo-dasa, the ten 
(dashan) months of the cycle-year 2 . Similarly Achilles' 
horses were originally two, Xanthus, the yellow, and Balios, 
the dappled star-horse, sons of the West wind, given to 
his father Peleus, god of the potter's clay, the Great Potter, 
by Poseidon, who was originally Erectheus or Ericthonius, 
the snake-god of the very fertile (ipi) earth (%9oov), who 
first owned the three thousand mares, the mother - stars, 
from whom twelve horses were begotten by Boreas, the 
North wind 3. The two original sun-horses, or star-season 
gods, became the three horses of Krishna driven by Daruka, 
the god of strong-drink (darn), given by Krishna to Satyaki, 
the son of Shini, the moon-goddess, who, with his ten sons 
slain, by Bhurishravas, the bearer of the Yupa or sacrificial 
stake 4, represented, like Haman and his ten sons, the eleven 
months of this year. This chariot was given to Satyaki 
before he encountered Kama, the horned-god of the three- 
years cycle, and the third horse is called Meghapushpa 
Valahaka, the cloud (megha) flower, the circler iyald) 5. This 
was a horse belonging to the car of Uttara, the North-god 
answering to the Greek Boreas, who was son of the king 
of Virata, and drove the car of Arjuna when he encountered 
the Kauravyas as a sexless warrior under the banner of 
the ape with the lion's tail ; but in the description of Uttara's 
car the horse Meghapushpa Valahaka becomes two, giving 
his car a yoke of four horses, the four seasons of this year 6 . 
This third horse in the chariot of Achilles is the mortal 

1 Mahabharata Sabha (Sabha-krigfi) Parva, ii. p. 4. 

2 Rg. i. 116, 17, 18. 

3 Homer, Iliad, xvi. 149, xx. 219 — 225, xxiii. 277, 278. 

4 Mahabharata Ehishma {Bkishma-vadhd) Parva, lxxiv. 20 — 23, p. 273. 
s Mahabharata Drona ( /ayadratha-badha) Parva, cxlvii. 45 — 48, p. 461. 
6 Mahabharata Virata {Goharaua) Parva, xlv., xlvi. pp. 107, 109. 



330 History and Chronology 

horse Pedasus, taken by him from Heetion, the father of 
Andromache, wife of Hector, together with the golden lyre 
of the sun-god x . Thus the third sun-horse of Satyaki and 
Achilles is the horse born of the cycle-year with its ten 
months of human generation. 

E. The Thibetan year of eleven months. 

I have already shown that this year of eleven months 
of thirty-three days each was probably the official year of 
the original Telis, Kandhs and Kaurs, and that it was the 
ritualistic year of the Northern Yavanas or barley-growers 
during the age of the worship of the year-god, symbolised 
in the head of the sun-horse. Further conclusive evidence 
on this point is given by the ancient Thibetan religion and 
the ritual of the Mossoos living to the South-east of Thibet, 
between it and Yunnan. They are called by Marco Polo 
Mossooman, and according to Chinese history they, under 
the leadership of Mong Tsu, invaded China from Thibet, 
and founded the Mossoo kingdom with its capital Li-kiang. 
It was reconquered by China in the 8th century A.D. ; but 
after the conquest the Chinese at first retained the royal 
dynasty as rulers under the supervision of a Chinese resident, 
and since they were deprived of their administrative powers 
they have been allowed to live in their ancient capital as 
Mandarins of the third degree. 

These people, though nominally Buddhists, still retain 
their old religion and their priests, whom they call Tong-pa, 
according to M. Bonin, and Bonbo by Mr. Rockhill. They 
worship the Buddha Shen-rab, to whom they offer living 
animals, and especially fowls. They make their circuits 
round their sacred buildings, answering to the circuits of the 
altar in the ritual of the Brahmanas. from right to left, 
against the course of the sun, instead of using the prescribed 
Buddhist Padakkhino, the sun-circle from left to right, with 
which every disciple was required to salute the orthodox 

' Homer, Iliad, xvi. 153, 154, ix. 186 — 1S8. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 331 

Buddha 1 . M. Bonin, the French Vice-President in Indo- 
China, visited their country on an official mission in 1895, 
and acquired a peculiarly intimate knowledge of their 
customs from one of their priests, who gave him a copy 
of their ritual written in Mossoo characters, with a trans- 
lation in Chinese of the first six pages, giving the Chinese 
equivalent for each Mossoo hieroglyphic. These latter are 
strictly pictographic ; thus the sign of the family is a house 
with a man and woman in it, that of prayer an altar, similar 
symbolisms being used for other abstract ideas ; but there 
are no characters denoting verbs. It therefore represents 
the earliest form of pictorial writing. In this ritual the 
ruling-goddess is the female Buddha, Kouei Ying, with the 
conch-shell of the year-god Vishnu, to whom rice and incense 
are offered. She is the goddess of the mother-tree, and her 
consort the male Buddha, her son, the sun-god, is represented 
with a halo round his head. Besides these gods, the sacred 
spear or fire-drill, the two birds of day and night, the original 
cloud Khu birds, the chief of the evil Genii, the god of the 
under-world, are represented, the last wearing the robes of 
a Thibet Lama. M. Bonin, in a paper read before the 
Oriental Congress at Paris in 1897, translated thirty stanzas 
of this ritual 2 . They apparently describe the course of the 
year opening with a blast from the conch of the year- 
goddess. It begins under the .constellation of the Tiger and 
the protection of the rising sun and moon. The Tiger, as 
one of the Chinese signs of the Zodiac, is, as Professor 
Douglas informs me, the constellation Wei, containing e, /j,, %, 
77, 0, 1, k, A,, v, Scorpio, and this is the constellation said in 
the Li-chI to culminate at dawn at the beginning of their 
year in January — February, when the sun is in Shih a 
Pegasus 3. This later constellation seems to have been that 
of the Tiger in Akkadian astronomy, for it is there called 

1 Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 217. 

2 M. Bonin, Note sur nn Mamiscrit Mossoo Actes du Onzieme Congyes Inter- 
national des Orientalistes Paris, 1897, sect. ii. pp. 1 — 10. 

3 Legge, Li-chI, Bk. iv.,The Yiieh Ling; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. p. 249. 



332 History and Chronology 

Lik-barra ; or the Striped-dog, by the Akkadians. It is the 
second in the Tablet of the Thirty Stars, beginning with 
Skat in Aquarius, called the Star of the Foundation x . 
These stars represent the course of the moon through the 
first three months of a lunar solar-year, beginning with 
Kislev (November — December), and in Chinese astronomy 
this month begins when the constellation Pi 7 Pegasus and 
a Andromeda culminates at dusk 2 . They appear in Rg. x. 
189, where they are called "the thirty stations ruled over 
by the mighty bull," the moon-god. In the Grihya Sutra 
they are the thirty sisters ruling the three Ashtakas or 
monthly festivals following the AgrahayanI full moon of 
November — December, that is exactly the same three months 
as those covered by the course of the Thirty Stars in the 
Akkadian Tablet. It was at the third festival called the 
Ekashtaka, or wife of the year, held on the eighth day of 
the dark fortnight of Magh (January — February), that the 
sun-moon-child, the " child of the majesty of Indra," was 
born 3. This child was, as we shall see in Chapter VII., 
the sun-god of the year beginning in Magh (January — 
February), the sun-physician who started on his career as 
the healing-sun-god on his horse Kanthaka, the sun-horse 
Pegasus, seven days after his son Rahulo, the little Rahu 
or sun-god, was born on the full moon of Magh 4. This sun, 
born as the rider on Pegasus, was, like Horus, whose sons are 
the four stars in Pegasus, the sun born of the Thigh, the 
constellation of the Great Bear, the Thigh of Set, the Ape- 



1 R. Brown, jun. , F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, 'Tablet of the Thirty 
Stars,' vol. ii. pp. 67 — 70. 

3 Legge, Li-chi, Book iv., The Yiieh Ling ; S.B.E., vol. xxvii. p. 301. 

3 Oldenberg, Grihya Sutras, Paraskara Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 5, a — k ; S.B.E. , 
vol. xxix. pp. 341—343. 

4 Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories : The Niddnakatha, pp. 82 — 84. The 
date here given for the departure of the Buddha on Kanthaka is the full moon 
of Asalhi (Asarh), June — July. But that was the date of the Glorification 
of the Perfect Buddha, the sun-god of the summer solstice, not of the birth 
of the first Buddha, the sun-physician, which is that stated in the Paraskara 
Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 5 c. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 333 

god. It was as an offering to this father-thigh-god that 
on the day following each of the Ashtakas a cow was sacri- 
ficed, and the left thigh and ribs presented to the presiding 
deity of the Fathers. Strong drink and garlands, the flower 
garlands of the Teli mother-goddess, were also offered to the 
Mothers *. 

The tiger and his tiger wives were, as we have seen, the 
parents of the Mons or Mallis, who, with the Licchavis or 
sons of the Akkadian dog (Lzg), formed the confederacy of 
the Vajjians or sons of the tiger ( Vyaghra), who ruled the 
country on the borders of Nepal which intervened between 
it and Thibet. This Tiger country was that in which the 
Buddha was born, and it was the year of the tiger 
and the Tiger-star Pegasus, which made its way into 
China, as is shown by the Chinese Calendar in the Ll- 
chi, in which the year beginning in January — February, 
the year of the birth of the Ekashtaka sun-god, is said 
to begin, when the sun is in Shih or Pegasus 2 . The 
year-sun born of the Tiger mother, the Mossoo goddess 
Kouei Ying, is the sun-god called Kwan-tsz'tsan, the self- 
existing sun-god also called Kwan Yin 3, or the male form 
of his mother the Buddhist Avalokatesvara, the visible 
(avalokitd) god, the sun of the Buddhist year of three 
seasons, who, as we have seen in Chapter II. p. 36, was 
represented in the statues seen by Hiouen Tsiang at Tiladaka 
in Magadha as born from Tara, the Pole Star, and the 
Buddha. He is represented as sitting on his mother's lap 
in one of the Chinese statues in the Musee Guimet in 
Paris 4. 

This Mossoo year begins with the birth of the Tiger-sun, 
and in stanza 14 of M. Bonin's translation of the ritual 



1 Oldenberg, Grihya Siitrds, Paraskara Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 8 — II, Sankha- 
yana Grihya Sutra, iii. 14, 3; S.B.E., vol. xxix. pp. 344, 105. 

2 Legge, Li-chi, Bk. iv., The Yiieh Ling, i. 1 ; S.B.E. , vol. xxvii. p. 249. 

3 Beale Buddhist Records of (he Western World, Hiouen Tsiang, vol. i. pp. 
60, note 210, 127, note 28, 12S. 

4 Guide au Musee Guimet Vitrine, 20, p. 135. 



334 History and Chronology 

the thirty-three days of the months of this year are called 
the thirty-three genii of heaven, while its twenty-two half- 
months are called the twenty-two genii of earth. It 
closes with the constellation of the Pig. This in Thibetan 
astronomy is the constellation of the Great Bear ruled by 
the goddess Marlchi, the spouse of Haya-griva, the god of 
the horse's (haya) neck {griva) or head, the ruling god of this 
eleven-months year, the sun-god born at its commencement. 
He is driven away by the Buddhist priests, as the most 
powerful of evil spirits, at the beginning of the sacramental 
service of three pills of flour, sugar and butter, partaken with 
beer, at the annual national festival, beginning their year in 
Magh (January — February) x , which is thus the same as the 
Mossoo year. This god, called in Thibetan Tam-ding, is' 
also married to Tara, the Pole Star. Hence Tara, the 
Pole Star, married to Su-griva, the bird-headed-ape, and 
Marlchi to Haya-griva, the horse-headed god, are equivalents. 
Marlchi means the fire-spark, and is feminine in Sanskrit. 
She is called in Rg. x. 58, 6 the goddess in the light heights 
of heaven, to whom the dead go. In the Mahabharata she 
becomes the male Marlchi, the father of Kashyapa 2 , the 
father of the Kushika, and one of the six sons of Brahma. 
In Hindu astronomy he is represented as one of the stars 
of the Great Bear, and with his son Kashyapa, he is one 
of the tail stars in the constellation Simshumara, the 
alligator 3. It is as a star, to which the Great Bear points, 
that Marlchi is represented in Thibetan theology. Then 
she is the goddess called also Vajra Varahi, the sow {ydrahi) 
of the thunderbolt, who has three faces, the left being that 
of a sow, and sits upon a lotus throne, driving the seven 
pigs, the seven stars of the Great Bear 4. She also appears 
in Japan as the war-god seated on a boar 5, and we see 

1 Waddell, The Buddhism of Thibet, pp. 361, 446, 44S, 502, 503. 

2 Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, Ixv. p. 185. 

3 Sachau, Alberuni's India, vol. i. chap. xlv. p. 390, xxii. p. 242. 

4 Waddell, The Buddhism of Thibet, p. 361. 

5 Guide au Musee Gtiimet Vitrine, 7 Classe des Tens, pp. 208, 209. 



of tJie Myth- Making Age. 335 

in him the boar-god who was once the Pole Star sow, the 
god who slew at the end of his year's course, in the constel- 
lation of the seven pigs, Adonis, the sun-god born of the 
Cypress tree, who was originally the Akkadian Dumu-zi 
Orion. This boar-god is the equivalent of the Akkadian 
god Mer-mer or Martu, the West wind, called the pig-god, 
and in his female form of Istar called Biz-bizi, the pig (pes) 
mother I . 

It seems probable that the constellation of the Great Bear 
was called that of the Seven Pigs in Akkadian as well as 
in Thibetan astronomy, for the planet Saturn is called 
Kakkab Ila Ninpes, the star of the god of the Lord of 
the Boar or pig 2 . But in the early astronomy, as we know 
from the Zendavesta, the planets were looked upon as rebels, 
or wandering stars not belonging to the divine *host of the 
ruling fixed stars. But this planet of the pig is, as its Roman 
name Saturnus shows, the planet of sowing (satur), that is 
the planetary analogue of the stars of the Plough, the 
Septemtriones, or seven oxen of the Great Bear. These 
in the ploughing age of the sun-ox Rama, were the succes- 
sors of and substitutes for the early Phrygian parent-stars 
of the pigs, the flock led by the year-boar of heaven, the 
boar and deer-sun-star Orion. 

We find also in Celtic mythology most important evidence 
confirming the conclusion that the Great Bear stars were 
once called, throughout Europe and Asia, the seven pigs. 
This is furnished by the story telling of the hunting by 
Arthur of Twrch Trwyth, meaning the king's boar and his 
seven swine-children, which proves that the Thibetan mytho- 
logy of the seven pigs was that of the .early pre-Celtic Picts. 
This boar-god, Twrch Trwyth, carried between his ears a 
comb, a razor and pair of shears, the mythical weapons 
for arranging the hair of the year-god in this age, when 
the cult of the hair was a dominant part of the national 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 181. 

2 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Pri??iitive Constellations, vol. ii., chap. xv. pp. 
215, 216. 



336 History and Chronology 

ritual. It was to get these weapons of the year-god that 
Arthur or Airem, the sun - ploughman, pursued Twrch 
Trwyth and slew him and his seven sons, the seven stars 
of the Great Bear, the eight ruling powers before the age 
of the sun-god of the eight-rayed star of Chapter VII. 
These ruling gods were those of the primitive Pictish 
population, called in Britain Prydain, or sons of the form 
(pryd), the people who tatooed their totems on their persons. 
The swine of heaven, the stars, were herded by the three 
stout swineherds of the Isle of Prydain. (i) Pryderi, the 
man of the form {pryd), son of Pwyil or Aravvn, the* god 
of the Southern Hades, from whom he got his swine, as 
the stars of the South; (2) Drystan, son of Taiiwch ; and 
(3) Colt, son of Coiifrewi, the three seasons of the year 
of March, the god of the horse's ears, whose ears were, as 
we have seen in Chapter V., first the ears of the ass-god 
Midas. Another form of Drystan is Drostan, the Druid 
who brought back the foes of Bran to life by a bath of new 
milk. He is apparently the summer-tree (dru) god. The 
story of the victory of Arthur over Twrch Trwyth and his 
seven pig-sons tells of the end of the rule of the Pole Star 
god and of the conversion of his worshippers to the service 
of the sun-god, for we find in the Mabinogion a dramatic 
version of the dialogue, in which Gwalch-mei, the Hawk 
of May, brought Drystan to leave the service of the ass- 
god March and to swear fealty to Arthur 1 . 

To return to the year of the Mossoos, who worship the 
seven stars of the Great Bear as the Seven Pigs. It is 
one began under the constellation of the Tiger or Horse 
Pegasus, and concluding under that of the Great Bear. It 
is thus the exact equivalent of the year of Horus in Egypt, 
ruled by the eleven stars of these constellations. Thus 
both years were years of eleven months of thirty-three 
days, each containing 363 days ; and that this was the year 
of Horus in Egypt is made still more probable by the 

1 Rhys, Celtic Folklore, chap. ix. pp. 509,510, 509 — 519,521 ; The Arthurian 
Legend, chap. i. p. 12, chap. xii. pp. 281 — 2S4, chap. xvi. pp. 378 — 380. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 337 

statement in the Egyptain official myth of Horus, ana- 
lysed by M. Naville, that Horus started with his son for 
Egypt to conquer Set in the three hundred and sixty- 
third year of his reign I . 

This year was also that of the Swabian goddess Ursula, 
the Little Bear, the German Horsel, who went cruising for 
three years, those of the cycle, with ten companions in 
eleven galleys, to free herself from the marriage proposals 
of a heathen king. As the price of her freedom she was 
to collect 11,000 virgins, and these were brought to the 
shrine of the gods of the three-years cycle, the Three Kings 
of Cologne, where, at the end of their three years' task, 
they were all slaughtered by the Haus 2 . 

These Mossoos, or Mon-su, were the sons of the mountain 
(mon) and the bird {stt), the two mother-birds they wor- 
shipped. They, who ruled India before the Kauravya Ku- 
shikas, came up thence and conquered the Thibetans, the 
Kout-song and the Min-kia, who are the aboriginal inhabi- 
tants of Yunnan, and are both named in the Mossoo ritual. 
They were worshippers of Hayagriva, the horse {hay a) headed 
god, represented with three heads and four arms, one pair 
holding and shooting the bow of heaven 3 ; he is thus a 
Thibetan Eurytus, the Centaur. This is the Indian black- 
barley mare, Yavadiya, the mother of the horse of Guga, one 
of the five Pirs or gods of the old five-days week, headed 
by Ram-deo, the god Ram 4. The Mossoos are described 
by M. Bonin as entirely matriarchal in their sexual relations, 
for the women did not marry but united themselves to tem- 
porary partners, a practice the Chinese have sought to stop 
by fining heavily all fathers of families who do not provide 
legitimate husbands for their daughters. 



1 Naville, Mythe d' 'Horus ; Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. xxvi. p. 390. 

2 Baring Gould, 'Curious Myths of the Middle Ages,' Ursula, Encyc. Brit., 
Ninth Edition, vol. xxiv. p. 13. 

3 Waddell, The Buddhism of Thibet, pp. 364, 444 — 446. 

4 Crooke, Introduction to the Popular Religions and Folklore of Northern 
India, pp. 130 — 132. 

Z 



33S History and Chronology 

F. The connection between this year and ceremonial hair- 

cutting. 

The Mossoos, like the Chinese, wear pig-tails, and this 
is also a characteristic mark of the Mundas. It was they 
and the Bhils, the men of the bow, who introduced into 
India the custom of hair-cutting. This was originally an 
offering to the river-parent-gods of a lock of hair, in which 
the strength of the body dwelt, according to the belief of 
the Jewish Nazarites, as set forth in the story of Samson. 
We see in the Creation story of the Edda how the sacrifice 
originated. It is there said the Ymin, the roarer, the thunder- 
cloud-god, made grass and trees of his hair. This hair thus 
offered was the firstfruits, which it was the duty of all 
men and women to offer to the creating rain-god-parent of 
the rivers. Thus Achilles sent a lock of his hair by the 
hand of his dead friend Patroclus to his parent-river Sper- 
cheios I . This custom of cutting off the front hair as an 
offering made at puberty apparently began in this epoch. 
It was a distinctive tribal mark of the Abantes of Eubcea, 
whose weapons were the ashen spears of the sons of the 
northern ash-tree, Yggdrasil, sacred to the sun-horse 2 . 
This tonsure offering, ascribed to the Celts under the name 
Celtic tonsure, was that made by all young Athenians as 
a preliminary observance necessary before they could claim, 
at the age of eighteen, their share in the village land and 
admission into the Phratria. It was originally required 
both from women and men, for Pausanias tells us that the 
women of Trcezen used to offer a lock of their hair to 
Hippolytus, the constellation Auriga 3, called by the Ak- 
kadians Askar, the goat. 

This constellation is also called by Aratus4 the goat. 
The goat-star is one on the left shoulder, and the kids two 

1 Iliad, xxui. 141 — 146. 2 Ibid., ii. 535 — 544. 

3 Frazer, Pausatzias, ii. 32, vol. i. p. 121. 

4 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., The Phainomena, or Heavenly Display of Aratus, 
155, 166, 679—682. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 339 

stars on the left hand of the Driver or Charioteer. This 
driver is Poseidon or the ocean-snake-god Ericthonius, king 
of the realms below the ocean on which the earth floats, who 
is called the Olenian x or Taraxippos, the frightener of 
horses. This epithet of Olenian, also given to the goats 
which he bears on his left shoulder, is derived from the 
Greek Olene {mKevrj), arm, and marks this driving-god 
as he who bears the goat of the Pole Star on his arm, an 
epithet exactly similar to that which calls Hermes, Krio- 
phorus, the Ram-bearer. Both epithets indicate that these 
year-gods are sons of the mother-tree growing on the very 
fertile (epixdcov) earth, from which the snake-god took his 
name. Thus he was the ruler of the cycle-year of the goat, 
and he, as we have seen, gave the sun-horses of this year 
to Achilles. He is also thus equated withThor and Pushan, 
from the latter of whom he may have taken his name of 
Poseidon, the god with the form (et'So?) of Push, as they were 
both gods whose year-chariot was drawn by goats 2 ; and we 
have seen that Pushan was the year-god who wedded the 
sun-maiden when the sun was in Cancer at the winter 
solstice, about 14,200 B.C., that is in the cycle-year. This 
god of the year-car, also called Hippolytus, is in this form 
the son of Theseus, meaning the Organiser or Civiliser, who 
learnt from the star-goddess Ariadne {Corona Borealis) to 
measure the course of the sun through the year by the stars. 
She thus furnished him with the clue by which he reached 
the centre of the labyrinth of the Minotaur, the year-god 
of the early Pole Star age, which he slew. The mother of 
Hippolytus was Hippolyte, daughter of Mars, the god of the 
South-west wind Martu, the tree-mother of the South ; and 
he, like Joseph, the eleventh son of Jacob, who saw in his 
dream the eleven stars of this year, was accused of attempt- 
ing to violate the second wife of Theseus Phcedra, the moon- 
goddess of the myrtle-tree, and torn to death by his own 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, vi. 20, 8, vol. i. pp. 3151 316. 

2 Mallet, Northern Antiquities : The Prose Edda, 21, p. 417 ; Rg. vi. 55, 6. 

Z 2 



340 History and Chronology 

horses at the end of this year, during which he drove the 
year-chariot x . He was restored to life by ^Esculapius, the 
god of Trcezen 2 , where hair offerings were made, and he 
then became Virbius, who, as we have seen, was the male- 
god of the Grove of Aricia, ruled by Diana or Tana, the tree- 
goddess of the Southern mud (tan), p. 34. This constellation 
of the god who drove the year-chariot of the goat became 
the guardian constellation of the Babylonians, the star- 
messenger of the Pole Star goat. They called the star 
Capella a Auriga, the little goat on the left wrist of the 
driver Dilgan, the god (dil) of the land (gan), and it was 
by the position of this star in relation to the new moon 
of the vernal equinox that the Akkadians, according to 
Dr. Sayce, determined the beginning of the year 3. It was 
also used as a year-star by the prehistoric Hor-shesu in Egypt, 
for Sir N. Lockyer tells us of three temples at Karnak 3 
Memphis and Annu oriented to Capella as a setting-star, 
at dates varying from 5500 B.C. to 3050 JB.C.4 These were 

1 A similar accusation was made against Bellerophon, Baal Raphon, the 
rider on Pegasus, and Peleus, father of Achilles, both gods of this year of transi- 
tion from Pole Star worship to that of the zodiacal sun, who was not the 
ploughing-sun Rama, guided by Lakhsman, but the sun making his own path 
through the appointed stars. Bellerophon was accused by Anteia, the backward 
(ante) goer, the moon-goddess of the stars going widershins round the Pole. 
She was wife of Prcetus, king of Tiryns, the oldest city of Argos, the land 
of the Southern sons of the constellation Argo. Peleus' accuser was Hippolyte, 
a female form of Hippolytus, he who was loosed by horses who circled the 
heaven as a night-star, in the path of the solar lunar zodiac. Her husband 
was Akastos, king of Thessay, and his name connected with d/ceo-T^s, a healer, 
and a.K7], a knife, as well as the (rrj/jLara Avypd, or dreadful signs, carried by 
Bellerophon as his death warrant (Homer, Iliad, vi. 178, 179), traced on 
a tablet (irivaKi), tell of this age of incipient sun-worship as the Bronze Age 
in which the barber-surgeons began to use the knife and written pictographic 
characters were first employed. Hewitt, Rulmg Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. 
i., Essay vi., p. 523—532. 

2 Frazer, Pausanias, i. 22, 2, vol. i. p. 31. 

3 Hewitt, Riding Races of Prekisto?-ic Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 419, 
note 2, 420; Sayce, Herodotiis, p. 402 ; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ' Euphratean 
Stellar Researches.' Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archceology, May, 
1893, p. 324. 

4 Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. xxxi. pp. 316, 318, chap. xxx. p. 312. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 341 

temples to Ptah, the opening {pataJi) god, who was, as we 
have seen, the Southern creating-ape of the worshippers of 
the evening stars. Annu also is On, the city of the sun-god, 
whose high-priest gave his daughter Asenath as wife to 
Joseph r , the interpreter (asipu) god of this year, who wore 
the star-coat of many colours, and ended his year as the 
star-god, the eleventh son of Jacob, in the pit dug for 
lions 2 , that is under the constellation Leo, ruling the year 
of the ape with the lion's tail. This year of Babylon ruled 
by Capella, beginning at the vernal equinox, was one 
equivalent to this eleven-months year in India, which was, 
as we have seen, measured by the constellation Chitra or 
Virgo ruling the month March — April, and it thus furnishes 
us with valuable evidence as to the chronology of the year 
of the hair-offerers. 

But to return after this digression to the historical evidence 
given' by the customs of cutting the hair, we learn from 
Pausanias that offerings of hair were made before marriage 
by the girls of Megara and Delos 3 ; and that the hair of the 
children of the Dorian city of Corinth was cut in remem- 
brance of the children of Medea 4, who was the counsellor 
of Jason, the healer (.'las), in the year-voyage of the Argo, 
the mother-constellation of the South, and of the Turano- 
Dravidian races who brought to Greece the Dravidian and 
Dorian customs of communal village holdings, communal 
education of the village children and common meals. 

Hence the custom of the ceremonial cutting of the 
children's hair was one' apparently brought from India. 
The ritual of the ceremony, which was performed on girls 
as well as boys, is described in the Grihya Sutra 5. It re- 
quires that the hair of all children should be cut off in the 



1 Gen. xli. 50. 2 Ibid, xxxvii. 20 — 24. 

3 Frazer, Pausanias, i. 43, 4, vol. i. p. 66. 4 Ibid., ii. 3, 6, vol. i. p. 75. 

5 Oldenberg, Grihya Sutra, Shankayana Grihya Sutra, i. 28, 1 — 24 ; Ashval- 
ayana Grihya Sutra, i. 17, 1 — 19, Paraskara Grihya Sutra, ii. I, 1 — 17, Grihya 
Sutra of Gobhila, ii. 9, 1—29; S.B.E., vol. xxix. pp. 55—57, 184—186, 301— 
303, vol. xxx. pp. 60 — 63. 



342 History and Chronology 

first or third year, or according to family custom, and this 
rule prevails among the Bhils, who do not acknowledge Hindu 
ritual, but who shave their children's hair when they are three 
or five years old. The custom is also observed by the 
Malays, who in India are the Mallis or Mons, the men of 
Malabar. They cut the hair in the first week after birth or 
a few days after the child is named, and in some cases leave 
the central lock, the top-knot of the_ Mundas, Mossoos and 
Chinese, but generally shave all the hair off 1 . But this 
custom of shaving, which involves the use of a sharp razor, 
belongs to a later age than that with which we are now 
dealing. It would be impossible for the barber-priest of the 
Grihya-Sutras, who performs the religious ceremony of the 
Hindu tonsure with a copper razor and one of Udumbara 
{Fiats glomerata) wood, to shave the heads on which he 
operated. 

It is most probable that the ceremony was originally 
performed at the age of puberty, and in the case of women 
before marriage, and that then only a few locks were cut 
off. Mr. Skeat saw seven cut from the head of the Malay 
bride at whose tonsure he officiated 2 . These locks with the 
water in which they were placed were buried at the foot 
of a barren fig-tree in hopes of making it bear fruit, a 
ceremony repeating the belief of the Edda that trees and 
grass were the hair of the creator Ymin. That the Hindu 
ceremony of the ceremonial clipping of the hair, succeeding 
that of the ceremonial offering of hair to the river-gods made 
by the Greek youths and maidens, was one dating from the 
age of this year is rendered probable by the ritual and 
the evidence as the institution of the barber's trade. 

The barbers of Bengal are divided into the three castes 
of Bhandaris, Hajams and Napits. Their caste customs 
prove that they were originally associations of Kushika 
priests, who belonged to the age of the worship of the 
Panch Pirs, or five village gods of the Telis, who, as we 

1 Skeat, Malay Magic, chap. vi. p. 341. 3 Ibid., chap, vi, pp. 353 — 355. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 343 

have seen, trace their descent from the gods of the eleven- 
months year. Thus the Bhandaris, the barbers of Orissa, 
still in some villages are the priests of these gods, and hold 
land rent free in payment for their services. Hence in 
Orissa, one of the birth-places of Indian ritual, the country 
of the great temple of Jagahnath at Poori, and of the 
Mahendra mountain sacred to Parasu-Rama, who was, as 
we have seen, a god of the cycle-era, the institution of 
barber-priests dates back to the days when grants of land 
were set apart for the village servants, and when the Mahto 
or superintendent of the Manjhus land allotted to the king 
was one of the village rulers, for the Mahto still exists in 
all Orissa villages. There also the rules as to the tenure 
of land are similar to those of the Ooraons, which I have 
shown in Chapter V. to be like those of the Pre-Celtic 
Welsh. The Bhandaris are marked as a Kushika caste by 
their marriage rites, for among them the bride and bride- 
groom are united not by the earlier Sindurdan ceremony 
of marking the partings of the bride's hair with red, as 
a symbol of making blood brotherhood, but by tying the 
hands of the wedded pair together with a wisp of Kusha 
grass x . 

The Hajams, the barber-surgeons of Behar or Magadha, 
the Chiroo country of the sun-god Ra-hu, marry by the rite 
of Sindurdan, but worship the five Pirs. They are the 
universal match- makers, the assistants of the Brahmin priest 
in the marriages of the higher and the marriage-priest of the 
lower castes. They also like the Bhandaris are village 
servants, getting a stipulated payment in grain in Behar, and 
an allotment of land in Chutia Nagpur and Manbhum. Their 
wives act as nurse-tenders to women during the last six days 
of their confinement, succeeding the Chamar or Dhanuk 
nurse who acts during the first six days. The Dhanuks, who 
are allied to the Chamars or workers in leather, are the sons 
of the bow {dhanu), who are the personal servants and 

1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Bhandari, vol. i. pp. 92—94. 



344 History and Chronology 

watchmen in the higher caste households of the old Maghada 
kingdom of Behar and of the North-west provinces. They 
are connected with the leading agricultural caste of the 
Kurmis, one of whose seven sub-divisions is called Dhanuk. 

They as a caste are divided into two sections, called Naga 
and Kashyapa. That is to say, they are the survivals of the 
old Naga Kushika, sons of Kashyapa, who, as I have shown 
in Chapter III. p. 86, were originally like the Dhanuks, 
sons of the bow (Kaus) *. 

In Bengal the barber-surgeon is called Napit, and gets 
an allotment of land as a village servant. He is the marriage 
agent and the marriage priest. In the Napit marriage, after 
the bridegroom has been anointed with mustard oil and 
turmeric as a member of the yellow race, he and the bride 
are both dressed in the sacred red tusser Kausya silk, and 
are united by the bride placing her hands palms downward 
on the palms of the bridegroom. The Napit barber, who 
officiates as priest, dictates the mantras the wedded pair 
are to repeat, and finishes the ceremony by instructing them 
in their duties in the words of the Gaur-vachana, or discourse 
telling of the wedding of Shiva and Parvati, the mountain- 
goddess, in her form of Gauri, the wild cow or Indian bison 2 . 

The ceremonies of the Hindu tonsure, called Chula- 
karman or arrangement of the hair, confirm the conclusions 
as to the great antiquity of their craft drawn from the caste 
usages of the barbers. They prove that the hair was 
originally only clipped as a firstfruits' offering of the growing 
products of the body, answering to the crops grown from the 
earth. Both were in primitive creeds the offspring of the 
rain, and hence arose the Malay rule forbidding coverings 
to be worn on the head 3. This must be left open, like the 
crops, to the life-giving air and rain, and most of the Indian 
lower castes, including the Ooraons, who tend their hair 
carefully, keep their heads bare. It was from the belief in 

1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Hajam, Dhanuk, vol. i. pp. 306 — 
309, 220. - Ibid., vol. ii. Napit, pp. 125 — 129. 

3 Skeat, Malay Magic, chap. ii. p. 43 ; Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. i. p. 1S9. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 345 

the sanctifying efficacy of water that each lock of hair was 
moistened before it was cut, and this was a repetition of the 
bathing of the child which preceded the hair-clipping. It 
was an early form of the baptismal rite common to all the 
yellow sons of the rivers who worshipped the wolf-sun-god, 
the Lycian Apollo, born on the yellow river Xanthus, in 
which he was bathed by his mother ; and in this ceremony 
the child was believed to be impregnated with the seed of 
life stored by the rain-god of heaven in the waters of the 
parent-river. The barber used mixed hot and cold water 
to moisten the head, and placed next each lock before he 
cut it a bunch of Kusha grass which he cut with the hair. 
He first wet the head three times from left to right, in the 
direction of the sun, with water, fresh butter and curds, but 
in cutting the hair he took the right-hand side first, and 
thence cut three or four locks. He then cut from the left 
side two or three locks, making the whole number of locks 
five or seven, answering to the five and seven days of the 
week. The Gobhila Grihya Sutra directs that seven locks 
are to be cut, beginning with the right side, whence the 
barber proceeds to cut seven locks first from the back and 
then -from the left side, thus going round the head contrary 
to the course of the sun. The twenty-one locks thus cut 
answer to the twenty-one days of the month in the seven- 
teen-months year of Chapter VIII. In this last ceremony 
it is clear that the cutting leaves three single tufts to be 
arranged, one on each side and one at the back of the head. 
These answer to the three locks worn by the Dakota or 
joined Indians x , the American representatives of the Hindu 
Khati. They have, as I have shown in the " Ruling Races 
of Prehistoric Times," reproduced in America the ceremony 
of the self-torturing Churuk or swinging Puja, a relic of this 
ascetic Hindu age. It is celebrated in Bengal about the 
beginning of Baisakh (April — May), a month which, as we 



1 Mallory, ' Picture Writing of the American Indians. ' Publications of the 
Bureau of Ethnology of t-he Smithsonian Institution, vol. x. p. 433. Fig. 55S. 



346 History and Chronology 

have seen, began the year of this epoch opening with the 
Roman Palilia and its associated festivals. Also they 
associated with this festival the Ooraon rites of cutting 
down the sacred Kurum or almond-tree and the buffalo 
dance I . The hair when cut by the Indian barber is to be 
placed on Kusha grass, bull's dung or Shami leaves, and, 
according to the Shankayana Sutra, to be buried in a garden, 
like the hair of the Malays. The Kusha grass, like that cut 
with the hair by the barber, shows that the ceremony dates 
from the age of the Kushika, while the leaves of the Sham! 
[Prosopis spicigera), the hundred-branched ishata-valsJid) tree, 
show that the ritual of the Ashvalayana Grihya Sutra, in 
which it and twenty-one bunches of Kusha grass are used, 
belonged to the later age of the Pandavas and of the seven- 
teen-months year. This Shami tree is that in which the 
Pandavas hid their bows during their seclusion in Virata 
in the thirteenth year of their exile from power. It was 
from this tree that Arjuna took his bow when he went forth 
with Uttara, the North-god, as his charioteer to fight the 
Kauravyas, under the banner of the ape-god with the lion's 
tail, who ruled this year. His bow was the Gandiva, the god 
[diva) of the land (gan), the rain-bow of the rain-god, which 
was, we are told, successively the bow of Sakra, the wet [sak) 
god, of Soma, the mother-tree-god, and of Varuna, the ram- 
rain (var) god of heaven, the rain-sun-god 2 . 

The barber's fee for this baptismal ceremony was rice, 
barley, sesamum seeds, and beans or millet, thus showing 
that it belongs to the age when barley and millets had been 
brought from Asia Minor to India with the sacred oil 
[sesamum orientale) of the Telis. 

The custom of ceremonial hair-cutting, of which I have 
now sketched the first beginnings was apparently exported 
from India to all the countries on the Persian Gulf and 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii. , Essay ix. pp. 291 — 293. 

2 Mahabharata Virata (Pandava-pravesha) Parva, v. pp. 12, 13, Virata (Go- 
harana) Parra, xli., xlii. pp. 100, 101 ; Zimmer, Alt indisches Leben, chap, 
iii. pp. 59> 60. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 347 

Southern Arabia, for Jeremiah xxv. 20 — 23, speaks of the 
people of Dedan in the Persian Gulf and of Tema, or 
Southern Arabia, as " having the corners of their hair pol- 
led." This expression apparently refers to a ceremonial 
cutting of the side locks like that prescribed in the 
Indian ritual. But the cutting of the side locks seems in 
Southern Arabia, according to Herodotus iii. 8, to have 
become a shaving of the temples and a cutting of the hair 
in front, after the fashion of Dionysus. He, whose car was 
drawn by Indian leopards, was originally the Indian god 
Shiva ; the, god of dancing accompanied by the consumption 
of ardent drinks, who was transported to Arabia, whence he 
brought to Greece the cult of Dionysus. He was, as I have 
shown in Chapter V. pp. 243, 244, the son of the Phoenician 
goddess Semele or Samlath, whose images were -worshipped 
under the Brythonic Celtic name of Pen or Pen Samlath, 
the lady (Pen) Samlath or Shemiramot ; and this name of 
the Celtic queen of heaven was given to the mother of 
the wine'god by the Indian Turvasu, who called the Pole 
Star Tarl Pennu. This shaving of the front of the head 
instead of only the side locks is the Celtic tonsure. It be- 
came in the later days of sun-worship, when men began 
to worship the rising-sun of the East instead of the setting- 
sun of the West, the tonsure which left only the scalp-lock on 
the top of the head uncut. This was the rite prescribed 
for all those who offered the sacrifices of the year of three 
seasons at the Vaishvadeva, Varuna Praghasah and Saka- 
medha festivals. The hair was to be cut for these festivals, 
and before partaking of the later Soma sacrament, with 
a copper razor, as in the ceremonies of the Grihya Sutra 
ritual I . It was this all-round tonsure, or clipping of 
all hair except the scalp-lock, which produced the pig- 
tail of the Mossoos, Chinese, Mundas, and all high-caste 
Hindus. 

1 E^geling, Sat. Brah., ii. 6, 4, 5 — 7 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 450. 



348 History and Chronology 

G. The Bronze Age in India. 

This evidence of the early history of ceremonial hair- 
cutting proves that it originated in the Copper Age pre- 
ceding that of Bronze. This last is called in the Rigveda 
and Brahmanas the epoch of the third-class of Fathers, the 
Agnishvattah, or fathers who burnt their dead. They are 
the race whose remains are found with bronze metal vessels 
and spear-points in the circular mound-tombs in the Nilgiris, 
answering in their form to the round burrows of the Bronze 
Age in Europe. The people who made these graves are 
depicted] in the clay figures found in them as wearing high 
hats x . Native tradition says that these tombs are those 
of the Pandyan kings, the Pandavas of the Mahabharata, 
and assigns them to the Kurumbas, the mixed shepherd 
and cultivating race, of whom the Kurmis, the Madras 
Kadumbis, are the leading members. These Kurmis are, 
according to the traditions of Central India, the rulers of 
the country who succeeded the Gonds, and who still survive 
also in the Kaurs, whom I have described in Chapter IV. 
pp. 195, 196. The hat shows them to belong to the race of 
the Chiroos, or sons of the bird (Chir), the ancient kings 
of Magadha, the Chiroos of Madras, and to the Dard sons 
of the antelope. That is to say, they are a branch of the 
Hittites, who are depicted on ancient monuments as wearing 
a high-peaked cap and shoes with turned-up toes, like 
those made by the Chamars in some parts of India. Offer- 
ings are made to these Fathers of the Bronze Age at the 
Pitriyajna, held at the autumnal equinox, and they are 
also invoked in the Vedic hymn summoning the fathers to 
this sacrifice 2 . To them, as to the Pitaro Barishadah, 
parched barley is offered, but the half-share allotted to them 
is ground and made into a porridge with the milk of a cow 
suckling an adopted calf 3. This is the Karambha, or barley - 

1 Hunter, Gazetteer of India, Nilgiri Hills, vol. x. p. 322. 

2 Rg. x. 15, 11. 

3 Eggeling, Sat. Bra/i., ii. 6, 1,6; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 421. 



of the Myth-Making Age, 349 

porridge offered to Pushan l , the year - god of the winter 
solstice, and husband of the sun-maiden, by whom he became 
the father of the sun-god born at the autumnal equinox. 

The stipulation that this porridge should be made of the 
milk of a cow suckling an adopted calf conveys most im- 
portant historical information, for it tells us of a time 
when the cow-mother-goddess of Indian ritual nursed a 
foreign calf, which was to supersede her. It tells in short 
of the supersession of the old worship of the buffalo, the 
animal always sacrificed in Central and Southern India 
at the Dasahara on the tenth of ^shvina (Assin) (September 
— October), that is on the tenth day after the new moon 
of the autumnal equinox. In this festival the first nine 
days of the week of the cycle - year celebrate the victory 
of Durga or Subhadra, the mountain-goddess of the North, 
over a female buffalo Mahishasur 2 . It was for this primaeval 
buffalo that the bull, cow and calf were substituted as 
sacrificial animals, and it is only these which are offered 
in the ritual of the Brahmanas and Grihya Sutras. 

But this sacred buffalo appears in the Rigveda as Indra 
himself. In the account of his birth 3 he is called the buffalo 
[inahisa) son of the cow who had only once calved (grsti) 4, 
and his father is called Vyansa, that is, as we have seen, the 
constellation Draco which ruled the year measured by 
seasons. He is said in another hymn to have killed this 
father as the Vritra or enclosing snake after drinking Soma at 
the six-days Tri-ka-dru-ka festival of the summer solstice, and 
he is there called Danu or son of the Pole Star 5. It was the 
Pole Star god of Orion's year that Indra, the buffalo, slew, and 
after his death, and the warning he received from his mother 
that the year-god had forsaken him, he called Vishnu the 
year-god of months, the antelope-god Krishna, to his aid, 

1 Rg. vi. 56, 1, iii. 52, 7. 

2 Monier Williams, Religions Thought and Life in India, chap. xvi. p. 431. 

3 Rg. iv. 18, 10 — -13. 

4 Grassmann, Worterbuch cum Rigveda, s.v. grsti. 

5 Rg. i. 32, 3—9. 



350 History and Chronology 

Vishnu asked him how he can hope to be trusted when he 
had killed his father, and Indra replied that (it was true) 
that he had once eaten dog's entrails ; that is, accepted 
the sacrifice of the dog offered, as we have seen in Chapter 
IV. p. 184, at the summer solstice, and become god of that 
dead year, the Vritra he slew, but that he was now converted, 
and would partake of the Soma of the Shyena or frost (shya) 
bird of the winter solstice x . That is, he would become the 
son of the mother of the sun-god begotten at the winter 
solstice and born at the autumnal equinox. That he was 
born in this hymn as the rain-god of a new era is shown by 
his saying before his birth 2 that he would be born from his 
mother's side as the sun-god, the branch of the mother-tree, 
begotten by the rain-cloud who entered his mother's womb, 
from the right side, as Gan-isha, the elephant-cloud-god, 
entered the right side of the Buddha's mother 3. He then 
promised that when thus born as the sun-god of a new era 
of years measured by months instead of those measured 
by seasons and weeks, he would betake himself to Vishnu. 

That this buffalo-god born of a buffalo-cow was a year- 
god is proved by Rg. ix. 113, 1 — 3, where the sun's daughters 
are said to have brought him, impregnated by Parjanya, 
the rain-god, to Sharyanavan, the ship {iiava) of the arrow, 
that is of the arrow-year of three seasons, when he as 
Indra shall drink Soma as the slayer of Vritra. These 
sun-maidens were the ten maidens or lunar months of gesta- 
tion of the cycle-year, whose singing makes the Soma flow 
for Indra and Vishnu, in their new alliance as year-gods of 
this year measured by lunar months 4. 

The buffalo is the sacred animal of the Malays, which they 
believe to support the earth as it floats on the ocean. It is 
the animal always offered and eaten at their sacrificial feasts, 
and is thus the counterpart of the Indian Dasahara buffalo. 
But this totem buffalo is not the sacred buffalo of the Malay 

1 Rg. iv. 18, II— 13. 2 Ibid., iv. 18, i, 2. 

3 Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories ; The Nidanakatha, p. 63. 

t Rg. ix. 56, 3, 4. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 351 

tin miners, who trace their origin to the Bronze Age. They 
sacrifice a white buffalo, which is thus the sun-buffalo of the 
sun-god born as the buffalo Indra of this year succeeding 
the three-years cycle. It is never killed in the mine, where, 
as in the Indian sacrificial ground sacred to the sun-god, 
no blood may be shed, but portions of every part of its 
carcase are deposited inside the spirits' audience-chamber 
outside the mine, and they invoke the god they summon 
to the sacrifice as the White Sheikh, king of the virgin jungle. 
But the flesh of this white buffalo, the Indra allied with 
Vishnu, is never eaten I . 

This was the buffalo-calf of the fathers burnt after death, 
and adopted as the son of the mother-cow of the Todas 
and Gautamas. That this age of the worship of the white 
sun -buffalo and of the white pig Vishnu of the Brahmins' 
daily meditations 2 on the history of time-reckoning, was 
one in which the heavenly bodies were believed to go round 
the Pole as stars of night and day, is proved in the ritual of 
the Brahmanas. In the Pitriyajna the priests make six circuits 
of the altar, the first three contrary to the course of the 
sun, from right to left, and the other three from left to right, 
sunwise. They wore the cord on the right shoulder, according 
to the rules of primitive Pole Star worship, except when they 
are kindling the fire, and then they shift it to the left 
shoulder, and become sacrificially invested as sun-worship- 
pers. When the cakes and porridge are presented to the 
Fathers the sacrificer with the cord on his right shoulder 
walks round the altar, sprinkling it from right to left 3. 
And thus in the ritual of these ancestral gods the ruler of 
Pole Star moon and sun-worship are intermingled, marking 
the sacrifice as one of the age of transition from the 



1 Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 56, 189, 190, 268, 269. 

2 Dubois and Beauchamp, Hindu Manners and Customs, chap, xiii., The 
Sam-kalpa, 3, vol. i. p. 147. 

3 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 4, 2, 9, ii. 6, 1, 12—34 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 
363, 423, 424, note 2, 428—433. 



352 History and Chronology 

primaeval star and moon worship to that of the adoration 
of the sun. 

It was these sons of the buffalo totem parent of the Malay 
rice-growing' races who were joined in India by the Northern 
worshippers of the horse's head, the god Dadhiank, the 
Atharvan, or son of the fire-god Atar, and he, according to 
the Brahmanas, imparted to the aboriginal Indians the 
mystery of honey, the inspiring mead I . The history of 
this union, which marked the beginning of the Copper and 
Bronze Ages in India, is given in the ethnology of the 
castes of the miners and workers in metal, who formed, 
according to the custom introduced by the Naga Kushikas, 
trade guilds united by community not of descent but of 
function. 

The only mining castes of Bengal and Csntral India, who 
are smelters of ore, are the Asuras and Lohars of Chutia 
Nagpur. The Asuras are the survivals of the Vedic Asuras, 
who traced their descent to the primaeval man-ape, the 
great Kapl or Kabir, and offered human sacrifices to the fire 
and sun-god. He was, in the ritual of the Finns, not the 
sun-maiden of the Rigveda, but a male deity, the Thoas 
Tammuz, or Dumu-zi, king of the Tauric Chersonesus, 
the sun-god Orion, the Jewish Moloch, and the Northern 
sun-god Sigurd, the rider on • the sun-horse Grani, who 
cooked and ate the heart of Fafnir, the snake-god, his 
predecessor as ruler of the year, and who was the Northern 
form of the Indian Vritra slain by Indra, after which feat 
he ate the dog's entrails, or the heart of the fire-dog, the 
creator of fire 2 . These sacrifices to the male sun-gods, 
which were first human sacrifices, were the only burnt- 
offerings of the Eastern Finns, who transmitted the same 
custom to the Arabs 3. They were also the burnt-offerings 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iv. I, 5, 18; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 277. 

2 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., p. 121 ; 
Rg. iv. 18, 13. 

3 Abercromby, Pre and Protohistoric Finns, vol. i. chap. iv. p. 167 ; Robert- 
son Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. vi. p. 210. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 353 

of the Angiras priesthood of the age of the cycle-year 
preceding the eleven-months year of the Atharvans, and 
this marks their Finnish descent. 

The Asuras, retaining the name of the Angiras priests, 
call themselves Aguryas, or Angurias, the men of charcoal 
[angdrd), who prepare the charcoal for ore smelting, and 
this name, together with that of the land of Anga, the 
volcanic Behar country ruled by Kama, the horned (keren) 
moon-god of the cycle-year, point to their descent from 
Phrygian Asia Minor, whence, as we have seen, the Itonian 
Athene of Bceotia got the name of Onka, which appears in 
India as Anga. This was the birth-land of the Hittite sons 
of the goat, whose year was the cycle-year of ten months 
of gestation, and the ancient name of ten as the number 
of the months of the heating and smelting of the sun-god 
of the workers in metal, born in the tenth month of ges- 
tation, survives in the word Agoor, ten, in the dialect of 
the Hindu Kasbhara, or workers in bell-metal r . This word 
Agur, ten, is also found in the name of Agurnath, the re- 
puted ancestor of the caste of Agurwalas, the wealthy guild 
of jewellers, bankers and usurers who trace their descent 
from the Vaishya Rajas of Agroha, on the borders of Raj- 
putana. It is to this caste that many of the wealthiest 
merchants of Behar and the North-west provinces belong. 
The god-king from whom they were descended was Guga, 
or Goga, Pir, the fifth of the five Pirs, the snake or Naga 
kings of Agroha; and, as we have seen on p. 337, he was the 
rider on the black sun-horse, born of Yavadiya, the barley- 
mare, and he and his horse together formed the Centaur- 
god of the Thibetan Buddhists and Mossoos, Haya-griva. 
Thus he was the Indian form of the Northern sun-god 
Sig-urd, the pillar {urdr) of victory (szg) gnomon-stone. His 
festival is on the ninth day of the dark half of Bhadon 
(August — September), or about the 9th of September 2 , and 



1 Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, vol. i. p. 161, § v. Kasbhara. 
= Ibid., Goga Pir, vol. i. p. 257. 

A a 



354 History and Chronology 

he is associated with a duplicate of himself, Ghazi Miyan x , 
whose festival takes place in Jaistha (Jeth ) May — June, 
as the god with bushy-hair 2 , the full-grown hair offered 
as the flrstfruits of the summer solstice. Hence as the god 
of the cycle-year of nine-day weeks he is the god Orion, 
the god of the Rathjatra of Krishna and Subhadra, wedded 
at the summer solstice as Ninus and Shemiramot at Babylon. 
He is said, as Agurnath, to have instituted eighteen sacrifices 
of the eighteen gotras, or sections of the Agurwalas, to 
Lakshmi, the goddess of the boundary-pillar (laksJi), the 
female form of the pillar-sun-god Sigurd, half of which 
only, nine sacrifices 3, were accomplished, and hence he is 
the god of the fourth part of the year of seventy-two weeks 
into which the cycle-year, as that of the five Pirs or five- 
day weeks, was divided. These were weeks of five nights 
and four days, whence the conception of the nine-days 
week arose. As the Agurwalas trace descent in the male 
line 4, his clan came from the north, and he, as Goga or Gog, 
was apparently the god of the bed of thirty-six cubits, the 
Og of the Bible, the god of the people called, in Ezekiel 
xxxviii., xxxix., Gog and Magog, who lived in the land 
of Rosh, the sun-god Ragh, Meshech and Tubal. This 
was the country of the Moschoi and Tiberinoi, who are 
described by Herodotus iii. 94, vii. 78, as wearing wooden 
helmets. It is called Meschia by Cedrenus. Gesenius 
identifies it with North Georgia or Iberia, and mentions 
the wall between the Caspian and Euxine seas, called the 
wall of the Ya-yuj and Mayuj, which was built as a de- 
fence against northern invaders. It was from these people 
that Hermes, the god of the pillar, got the Phoenician 
name of Moschophorus, or calf-bearer s, the god who, as 

1 Miyan is the 27th division of the Persian Lunar Zodiac representing the 
stars 7 Pegasi a Andromedte, so that his constellation is that of the horse 
Pegasus. R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Euphratean Stellar Researches, p. 10. 

2 Elliot, Supplementary Glossary, Ghazi Miyan, vol. i. pp. 251, 252. 

3 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Agurwala, vol. i. p. 5. 
t Ibid. 

5 Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 299. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 355 

the sun-gnomon-pillar, produced the sun-calf, the calf-born 
Indra. This was the sun-god of the Sakya Kunti-bhojas, the 
Bhojas of the lance {kunti) of the race of the Bhoja king 
Ugrasena, who founded Kosambi at the junction of the 
Jumna and Ganges, and called the country round it Vatsa- 
bhumi, the land of the calf (vatsa), the ancient name of 
Bundelkund. They belonged to the army of the Iberian 
Finn miners, worhippers of Ya, the full moon, who came 
to India from Colchis, another name of the Gog and Magog 
country, whence, according to Herodotus, circumcision was 
first introduced. This country, called also Tubal after the 
father of the workers in metal, was a land of great mineral 
wealth. These dealers in minerals, who called Agur- 
nath, the lord of ten (Ag-ur), their ancestral god, were ap- 
parently the introducers of the Northern decimal system 
of notation, differing from the Southern duodecimal system 
of counting by " gundas " or fours, and they united the 
Northern and Southern races in India. For their father- 
god Agurnath or Goga (the equivalent of Dasaratha, he 
of the ten chariots or lunar months, the father of Rama) 
married the daughters of two Naga Rajas, and he stipulated 
that the children of one of the two princesses should bear 
their father's name, while those of the other wife should 
trace their descent from the mother, according to the custom 
of the Naga races I . They were thus the successors of the 
Naga Kushika, and as Agurwalas they are strict monoga- 
mists like the Finns. Their native land in Asia Minor is 
called, in Ezekiel xxxix. 11, 12, Hamon Gog, which is 
apparently the land of Baal Khamman, the pillar-god. It 
was from this god of the lunar months that the eighteen 
tribes of the Bhojas, or sons of Druhyu, the sorcerer-god, 
originated 2 . They are the sons of Gog, who are called 
in the Recueil des Histoires de Troye, of the Middle Ages, 
sons of a race of giants, the Rephaim descended from the 

1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Agurwala, vol. i. p. 5. 

2 Mahabharata Sabha {Rajasuya-rambhd) Parva, xiv. p. 46, Adi iSatnbhava) 
Parva, lxxxv. p. 260. 

A a 2 



356 History and Chronology 

thirty-three daughters of Diocletian, the thirty-three days 
of the months of this year. They are also descendants 
of the twin door-posts of the Garden of God, the Stars 
Gemini, who as Gog and Magog stand at the door of the 
Guildhall in London. 

The Lohars, congeners of the Agurias or Asuras, were first 
workers in copper (loha), a name that means the red, " roh," 
metal, and this change of r into 1 marks them as allied 
to the Finn races, who in Greece changed the name of the 
Phrugyes, or sons of fire (fikur), into Phlegyes. Their 
caste institutions prove them to be a mixed race, who were 
first sons of the mother-mountain, which they worship as 
Mohangiri, the Marang Buru of the Mundas, and in Chutia 
Nagpur their priests are the village Pahan and the provin- 
cial Ojha, but the sub-caste of Sad-Lohars, - immigrants 
from the Hindu (Sad) districts, employ the village barber 
as their marriage priest. They are most closely allied with 
the Bagdis, who were originally a caste of hill fishermen, 
sons of the tiger and the sun-cock, one of whose totems 
is the Sal-machh, or fish of the Sal-tree I . 

Both Lohar and Bagdi bridegrooms begin their wedding 
ceremonies by marrying the Mahua tree (Bassia latifolid). 
This tree, through the use of its honey-sweet flowers in 
making intoxicating drink, has become the honey-tree of 
India, which gave honey to the Ashvins and the sons of 
Dadhiank, the horse's head. This mahua mead replaced the 
rice and murwa beer of the Mundas and Thibetan Buddhists. 
Both the Lohars and Bagdis worship the wise snake-goddess 
Manasa, the female form of Manu, to whom rice, sweetmeats, 
fruit and flowers are offered as the mother-snake-goddess 
of the early village founders. But to these are added, at her 
festivals held on the fifth and twentieth of the four rainy 
months from the middle of June to the middle of October, 

1 Their totems are : — Ardi the fish, Bagh-rishi the tiger, Kachchap the 
tortoise, Kasbak the heron, Pak-basanta the bird, Pat-rishi the bean, Ponk-rishi 
the jungle-cock, Sal-rishi or Sal-machh the Sal-fish. Risley, Tribes and Castes 
of Bengal, Bagdi, vol. ii. Appendix i. p. 5. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 357 

the moon-goat and sun-ram of the Northern immigrants. Both 
these castes, as well as all those of the barbers and workers 
in metal, burn their dead, and thus trace their origin to the 
Bronze Age. The connection between them and the men 
of the eleven-months year is shown in their custom of per- 
forming the shradh or funeral ceremony on the eleventh day 
after death, or at the end of a week of that year I . This 
custom is 'also observed by the Kamis, the Nepal branch 
of the Kamars or metal workers of Bengal, and the Bhan- 
daris, the barbers of Orissa 2 . 

Their goddess Manasa is the sister of Vasuki, the snake- 
god of the summer solstice, and mother of the sun-god 
Ashtaka. She is the Hindu counterpart of the snake 
Erectheus at Athens, fed with monthly honey-cakes, who 
occupied the western end of the Erictheum, the eastern 
being the temple of Athene Polias 3, the tree-mother-goddess 
Onka or Anga of the mining races. They, in India, are the 
sons of the Sal-tree, whence the best charcoal is made, and 
this as a resin-bearing-tree is the Hindu equivalent of the 
resinous pine-tree of the Finn country, the pine-tree of the 
cave-mother Cybele. Manasa is also the female form of the 
snake Fafnir of the story of Sigurd, the year-god slain by 
this rider on the sun-horse, who guarded the year-treasures of 
Andvari, the wary (van) dwarf. These dwarf-gods were the 
parents of the dwarf Finn races, the Ugrian-Finns, the first 
workers in metal who lived in the country between the Volga 
and the Ural mountains, where copper has been smelted from 
time immemorial, and where gold is also found. It was the 
Ostiak and Mordvin Finns who introduced into India the 
horse-sacrifices which they still offer, as well as the use 
of horses in preference to buffaloes and bullocks 4, and they 



1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Lobars, vol. ii. pp. 22, 23, Bagdis, 
vol. i. pp. 37 — 43- 

2 Ibid., Bhandaris-Kamis, vol. i. pp. 94, 395. 

3 Frazer, Pansanias, Erichthonius Erictheum, vol. ii. pp. 168, 169, 330 ff. 

4 Abercromby, Proto and Prehistoric Finns, chap. iv. , Their Prehistoric 
Civilisation, vol. i. p. 217. 



358 History and Chronology 

brought also their acquaintance with mining. They were 
of the race of the dwarfs who made the honey (Mordvin, 
med) mead, drunk by the gods of the Edda, who ate the 
flesh of the boar Scehrimnir. They, who were gold-washers 
in the Volga country, became in Chutia Nagpur the Jharas, 
or gold-washers, who extracted gold from the river sands of 
the Sona-pet or womb of gold in the Munda country, and 
who took gold from the sands of all the rivers watering the 
South of the Chutia Nagpur plateau from East to West. 
Their name for gold is embodied in that of the Sone, 
meaning the " golden " river. It was on the banks of the 
Niranjara or Phagun river, which was once the main stream 
of the Sone J , that the Buddha obtained enlightenment, when 
sitting under the Nigrodha or Indian Banyan tree of the 
Kushika races. The word for gold, whence the river-name 
was derived, is in Pali Sonnam, spelt with the Dravidian 
cerebral n, which is a substitute for an original r preceding 
it, as the Sanskrit Suvarna becomes in Pali Suvanno. Hence 
the original name for gold is Sornar, its Tamil name, and 
this is reproduced in the Mordvinian Sirna, the Votiak 
Zarni, Ostiak Sarni, which became the Zend Zar 2 , the 
primitive root of the Sanskrit hiranya. The Finnic worker 
in gold has become the Hindu Sonar, the banker and gold 
merchant. 

These Sonars of the East are the wealthy representatives 
of the Western Saus, sons of Su, the bird who came from 
Saurashtra, the Western kingdom (rdsktra) of the Saus, to 
settle in the eastern land of Anga. They traced their descent 
to Marudevi, the mountain (maru) goddess, wife of Nabhi, the 
navel, the central fire on the altar, who were parents of the 
first Jain Tirthakara Rishabha, the bull of the Kashyapa 
clan, born in the land of the Ikshvakus on the eighth day 

1 The Sone has like the Kusi and Gunduk on the north bank of the Ganges 
moved in the course of ages from East to West, so that the present course 
is very far removed from that it followed in the ages of this epoch. 

2 Abercromby, Proto and Prehistoric Finns, chap, v., The Iranian Period, 
p. 232. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 359 

of the dark-fortnight, that is on the twenty-second of Cheit 
(March — April), when the sun was in the constellation 
Uttarashadha Sagittarius, that is about 15,000 B.C. or the 
beginning of the cycle^ear I . He was the predecessor of 
Arishtanemi, who was, as we have seen, the Jain ruler of this 
eleven-months year. It was apparently at this epoch, when 
the Bronze Age began, that the Jain merchants ruling the 
Naga confederacy came from the West to the East. They 
made Parisnath on the Barrakur in Chutia Nagpur, formerly 
the sacred mountain of the Mundas, the holy High Place 
of the Jain Panris or Paris, the trading (pani) races, and 
fixed their headquarters in Chutia Nagpur, the mother 
country (chut) of the Nagas, and in the plains of Anga and 
Magadha forming the Western side of the Gangetic valley. 

By the help of the Finn miners who accompanied them 
they obtained large and constant supplies of gold from the 
sands of the rivers, diamonds from the diamond fields, and 
opened up the copper mines at Baragunda on the Northern 
slopes of Parisnath, and at Lando in Seraikela in Singh- 
bhum. These were worked throughout the long period 
intervening between the opening of the mines and the 
establishment of Mussulman rule in Bengal, and hence the 
immense supplies of ore contained in these vast deposits 
have now been almost exhausted. But no one who has 
visited them can fail to be impressed with the magnitude 
of the works and the great trading energy of the race who 
superintended them. They made their capital at Dalmi on 
one of the gold-bearing rivers, the Subon-rikha or Suvarna- 
riksha, the channel (riksha) of the race ivarna) of the Sus. 
And the ruins of the city they founded still exist on its 
banks, and from thence they ruled the whole of Bengal and 
Behar 2 . Their seaport was Tamluk, at the mouth of the 

1 Jacobi,y«/wa SutrdS, Kalpa Sutra, Life of Rishabha , S.B.E., vol. xxii. 
pp. 281, 282. 

2 Tamluk in Orissa was the ancient seaport not only of Chutia Nagpur, but 
of Behar, the country of Anga in the West of the Gangetic valley, and Kashi 
Benares. It was commercial goods from Orissa and the port of Tamralipti 



360 History and Chronology 

Hooghly and Rupnarain. Its Sanskrit name, of which the 
modern Tamluk is a corruption, is Tamra-lipti, the copper 
{tamra) port ; and it was, according to tradition, the capital 
of the Peacock (mayurd) kings of the Bhars or Bharatas, 
whose descendants still rule the adjoining semi-independent 
state of Moharbhunj. The original Mayura dynasty was 
succeeded, as maritime trade developed, by the Kaivarta 
or Kewut kings, a caste of fishermen and merchants, who 
make marriages by mingling the blood of the bride and 
bridegroom, in addition to the ordinary Sindurdan ceremony. 
That the country was originally ruled by races in touch with 
the Ooraon rulers of Chutia Nagpur is proved by the fact 
that the Kadamba almond-tree of the Ooraons is the sacred 
tree in the precincts of the ancient Tamluk temple of Kali, 
dedicated to Vishnu, the year-god of the peacock race, whose 
deification has been discussed in Chapter V. p. 281 z . The 
name of this seaport shows first that the founders were of 
Dravidian origin like the Ooraons, whose native language 
is a Dravidian dialect, for the Sanskrit Tamra is a form 
of the Tamil Thambiram ; and secondly, it stamps the city 
as the seaport of the copper merchants of the Bronze Age, 
and proves that they must have been great exporters of that 
metal. This was originally used without alloy, as we learn 
from the copper razors of the barbers, the copper axes 
belonging to Colonel Samuells found near Baragunda, and 
the copper knives found by Dr. Schliemann in the oldest 
but one of the six superimposed Trojan cities. But it must 
have very soon been mixed with alloys of zinc and tin. 
These metals, and also copper, are found near together in 
Udaipur in Rajputana 2 ; and it was there probably in the 

that Tapassu and Bhalluka were bringing to Kushi in five hundred carts when 
they met the Buddha at his final transformation into the sun-god, Lord of 
Heaven, when the four bowls of sapphire and four of jet, the skies of day 
and night, brought by the four Loka Palu angels, ruling the four quarters 
of the heavens, became the one bowl or canopy of the sun-god, the universal 
ruler. Rhys D.avid, Buddhist Birth Stories : The Nidauakatha, p. no. 

1 Hunter, Gazetteer of India, Tamluk, vol. xiii. pp. 172 — 173. 

- Ibid., Udaipur, vol. xiii. p. 401. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 361 

adjoining country of Khatlawar, sacred to the year-god 
Krishna or Vishnu, that Indian brass and bronze were first 
made, and the ancestors of the Kassara or Kasbhara here- 
ditary braziers probably accompanied the Jain Khati kings 
of the Peacock dynasty to Chutia Nagpur, where they 
established the brass trade of Manbhum, the district in 
which Dalmi is situated. 

It was these trading kings who fought their way through 
India who founded the great merchant caste of Bengal, the 
Subarna or Suvarna Baniks, the Suvarna traders, the Bengal 
Shus. It is to this caste who boast their descent from the 
Kushika father-gods, Kasyapa, Gautama and Vyasa, and 
which is celebrated for the beauty of its women, that the 
great merchant families of the Pals, who gave the dynasty 
of the Pal kings to Bengal, Lahas, Des, Chandras, Sinhas 
or Sils, belong, and they show equal ability in literature and 
in commerce I . Barbers occupy a prominent position among 
them as priests at their weddings. 

It was apparently during the rule of the barber-priests 
and merchant-kings that Tamra-lipti was made the principal 
trading port between Bengal and Malacca, the great tin- 
producing country ; and it was hence that tin was procurable 
much more easily than from Eastern India, for the only tin 
deposit in Chutia Nagpur is so poor in quality that it has 
never been worked. It was the exchange of the copper 
of Tamluk with the tin of the Malay miners, brethren of the 
Mallis of India, which made bronze the metal of India and 
inaugurated the Bronze Age of the Pandava kings. 

The historical retrospect thus traced from the trade tradi- 
tions, ritual and caste customs of the men of the Copper and 
Bronze Age, who burnt their dead, coincides exactly with 
that deduced from the Mahabharata and Harivansa. It 
tells us how the Suvarna, the race of Sus dwelling on the 
banks of the Indus, and in Saurashtra and Khatlawar 
founded in the West, the empire of the Yadu-Turvasu or 

1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Subarnabanik, vol. ii. pp. 261—266. 



362 History and Chronology 

Yavanas, the sons of the barley (yava), who became the 
Ikshvaku kings of Patala, and afterwards of Patali-putra, 
the son of Patala (Patua). These Khati or Hittite Nagas 
founded from the artisan classes of village servants and 
cultivators the trading guilds or castes united by community 
of function. They under the guidance of the Finn mining 
races first established the Yavana or Yona rule from their 
capital of Yonagurh near the Girnar hill of Arishtanemi, 
the year-god of this epoch. He was, as we have seen, the 
ruling deity of the Ugra-sena or Ugro Finns, and of their 
King Kansa, the moon-goose, who, as king of the lunar 
dynasty, ruled the West of India as far East as Magadha, 
where Jarasandha, whose subordinate he was, reigned as 
central emperor, the Chakravarti or wheel-turning king. 

He was the son of the mango, born, as we have seen, of 
the two Kushi or Kushite queens Ambika, and Ambalika, 
the Pole Star in Cygnus, and the Great Bear mother. 

The rule of these ruthless conquerors was overthrown by 
Krishna, and the Pandava Bhima, who killed Kansa and 
Jarasandha, and made Krishna or Vishnu the year-god in- 
stead of Jarasandha's god, the three-eyed Shiva of the three- 
years cycle, to whom he offered human sacrifices. It was 
after this victory that the Jain community of merchant- 
warriors established the rule of the Su-varna in Eastern 
India, and made the sons of Rishabha, the bull, supreme 
rulers of the land. It is as a survival of the imperial rule of 
the sons of Indra, the eel-god, who became the buffalo- 
bull, that the Rajas of Chutia Nagpur wear on the day of 
their coronation a turban twisted into a peculiar shape to 
represent the ancestral bull's horns, and the maker of this 
turban holds a village granted to his ancestors free of all 
payments except the discharge of his duty of providing the 
official head-dress of the Raja. 

It was from this amalgamation of the alien and indigenous 
races that the Bharata confederacy was formed under the 
rule of the Mayura or Peacock kings. Their leaders were 
the Licchavis, the sons of the Akkadian dog (lig), who joined 



of the Myth-Making Age. 363 

the tiger-born Mallis to form the confederacy of the eighteen 

tribes of the Vajjians, sons of the tiger {vyaghvd), who ruled 

the country to the North-east of the Gangetic valley. Their 

chief clan was that of the warrior Gnatikas I , or sons of the 

mother gfia, the Greek yvvr), called the fire-mother in Rg. 

iv. 9, 4. She is the <f even " or queen mother of the Goidelic 

Celts who always burnt their dead, and who were thus the 

Pitaro Agnishvattah of this new confederacy. They were 

the dwarf Celtic race of miners, who, in Europe, became the 

Celts of Auvergne and Central France. In India they were 

the dwarf Asuras and Lohars. among whom the average 

male height is only about 163 centimetres, or 5 ft. 4 in., and 

their Cephalic index 75 2 . It was they who introduced into 

India the Ooraon land tenures, giving an area of royal land 

in each village to the king, which, as I have shown in 

Chapter V. p. 287 ff, were very similar to those of the Goidelic 

Celts in Wales, both being founded on the earlier tenures 

of the Picts, the painted Pitaro Barishadah, to whom 

parched barley was offered. 

This race of the fathers who burnt their dead was allied 
with the sons of the mother-fire-goddess, called in the 
Rigveda Matar-i-shvan, the mother of the dog (shvan), who 
came to India, according to the title of the Second Mandala 
of the Rigveda, as the Median collected race, the Saunaka, 
or sons of the dog-mother, and of Bhrigu the fire-father. 
These were the yellow Finns, who, as the race of Han the 
mother-goddess Shar, furnished twenty-two of the twenty- 
four Jain TJrthakaras 3. These were the men of the new or 
young (kana) race represented by the Kanva priests, the 
reputed authors of the eighth Mandala of the Rigveda. 
Their representative parent Kanva was the nominal father 
of Sakuntala, mother of Bharata, born on the Malli river 
Malini4. 

1 Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Kalpa Sutra, no; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 256. 

2 Risley, Tribes and Caslcs of Bengal, Anthropometric Data, vol. i. pp. 
viii., xxxiv. 

3 Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Kalpa Sutra, 2 ; S.B.E., vol. xxii. p. 218. 

4 Mah.abha.rata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, lxxi. p. 218. 



364 History and Chronology 

These Kanvas were priests of the Yadu-Turvasu and 
of the mountain-god Arbuda, whose shrine is the sacred 
Jain mountain Arbuda or Abu in Sirohi in Rajputana. 
This is the god called in the Rigveda the son of the Ahi 
Urna-vabha, the weaver of wool, the goddess-mother of 
the Ram-sun * who was slain by Indra, and who is named 
six times in the second and eighth Mandates out of the 
seven times he is mentioned in the Rigveda. On his sacred 
mountain near the copper mines of Sirohi and the, tin and 
copper mines of Udaipur are two of the finest existing Jain 
temples. One of Adi-nath or Rishabha, the first Tirthakara, 
and one of Nemi-nath or Arishta-nemi, the twenty-second 
Tirthakara and ruler of this year 2 . They are the upper and 
nether mill-stones of Jain theology, and it is under this sym- 
bol that the snake Jarat-karna and his counterpart Arbuda are 
worshipped in the Vedic ritual. They are the two pressing 
or grinding-stones which extract the sap of the sacrificial 
Soma, and in the ritual of the Soma sacrifice they are 
invoked in four Vedic verses : two to Savitar, the sun-bird 
Su, which is the root of Savitar, and two to Indra 3. After 
these are recited fourteen stanzas of the hymn Rg. x. 94, 
ascribed to the Rishi-Arbuda. In this hymn (stanzas 6, 7, 
8) the pressing-stones are invoked as drawn by ten horses 
furnished with bridles and harnessed to ten poles, the ten 
sacrificial stakes indicating the ten lunar months of the 
cycle-year. Before the last stanza of this hymn, Rg. x. 76, 
ascribed to Jarat-karna, and x. 175, ascribed to Arbuda, are 
recited, and they are both addressed to the gravanah or 
pressing-stones, pierced with the holes through which the 
bar uniting them is inserted 4. In the titles of these hymns 
Jarat-karna is called the Airavata or elephant-bull, and 
Arbuda Urddhvagrava, the pressing-stone lifted up to 



1 Rg. viii. 32, 26. 

2 Hunter, Imperial Gazetteer of India, Abu, vol. i. pp. 8, 9. 

3 Rg. i. 24, 3, v. 8i, I, viii. 81, 1, viii. I, 1. 

4 Ibid., x. 94, 11. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 365 

heaven, and both are said to belong to the serpent (Sarpa) 
race of Nagas r , Arbuda being the son or counterpart of 
Kadru the mother-tree (dm) of the Nagas, the goddess 
Ka or Who ? This ceremony forms part of the ritual of 
the mid-day pressing sacred to the meridian-sun, to which 
Indra is summmoned as the chief god. 

These father and mother-stones, the revolving heaven- 
drill which presses out on the nether mother-stone the life- 
giving sap of the Soma plants placed between them, are the 
pair called in the Mahabharata Jarat-karu, they who make 
old (fara). The male belongs to the sect of the Yaya-vara, 
the wandering mendicants, who were the early Jains, whose 
god was Yayati, the full-moon-god (Yd), father of the 
Yadu-Turvasu. The female was the sister of Vasuki, the 
snake-god ruling the summer solstice. The male Jarat- 
karu, as the dying sun-god who has fulfilled his yearly task 
of begetting his successor, leaves his mate when Ashtaka 
is begotten as the god of the eight (ashtd), the sun-god 
of the true Soma of Chapter VII 2 . He is the god of the 
eight-rayed star of day worshipped by the Akkadians as 
Din-gir and Esh-shu, words meaning both god and an ear 
of corn 3. They are, in short, the fire-drill and socket which 
gave birth to the sun-god born from the altar flame kindled 
by the wood of the mother-tree. 

H. The story of the two thieves who robbed the treasure- 
house of heaven. 

The name Arbuda given to the tree-mother-god means 
also the god of the Semitic Arba or four, the Hittite name 
which, as we have seen, appears in that of the Naga Gond 
kingdom, called Vidarba, or the double (vid) four (arba), 

1 Ludwig, Rigveda, vol. ii., Hymns 785, 786, 787, pp. 412—415 ; Eggeling, 
Sat. Brdh., iv. 3, 3, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 331, note I, 332. 

2 Mahabharata Adi (Astika) Parva, xlv.— xlvii. pp. 132 — 139. 

3 Ball, 'Akkadian Affinities of Chinese.' Transactions of the Ninth Inter- 
national Congress of Orientalists, § China, Central Asia, and the Far East, 
p. 685 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. Preface, p. xxviii. 



■$66 History and Chronology 

the eight Gond tribes. The Hebrew history of this epoch 
of the deification of the four ruling gods, the four seasons 
of this year of eleven months, is to be found in the history 
of Caleb, the dog (kalb), the star Sirius. He was brother 
of Ram, the sun-god and grandson of Perez, the cleft, the 
male form of the Phcenician goddess Tirhatha, with the same 
meaning, who was, as we have seen, the fish-mother-goddess 
of the Phoenicians, mother of Shemiramot. He and his 
brother Ram were both descended from Tamar, the date- 
palm-tree. In the historical genealogies of the Chronicles 
various lines of descent are assigned to him. As the great- 
grandson of Tamar his father is Hezron, brother of Hamal, 
the star /3 Arietis, from which the sun was born in the 
cycle-year. Hezron died in Caleb-Ephratah, the city of 
ashes (eplird) of Caleb, which marks him as god of the city 
of the sun-god, in the year ruled by Sirius. In another 
genealogy he is the brother of Shuhah, Judah's first wife, 
the bird ( Shu ) goddess, who preceded Tamar, and the 
ancestor of Ir-Nahash, the city (ir) of the Nagas, and the son 
of Jephunneh, the beautiful youth J . In short, he is the star 
Sirius, which was first the dog-star guarding the sun's path 
along the Milky Way, then the young man, fifteen years old, 
who became afterwards the Zend Tishtrya (Sirius), the white 
horse of the sun, the Zend form of Indra, as the white 
buffalo, who made the black cloud, the horse's head, give 
up the rains of the rainy season at the summer solstice 2 . 
He is in his second Avatar as a star-god ruling this year 
Tishtrya, the bull with golden horns, who intervened between 
Tishtrya, the bright youth, fifteen years old, Caleb's father, 
Jephunneh, and Tishtrya, the white sun-horse. 

It was he who killed the old trinity of Southern Palestine, 
the gods Shesh-ai, Ahiman, and Tol-mai. These words, 
as all Hebrew scholars admit, are not Hebrew. They seem 
to me to be god-names imported into Hebrew theology 

1 I Chron. ii. 10 — 16, 18, 19, 24, iv. 11, 12, 15 ; Gen. xxxviii. 2. 

2 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Tir Yasht, vi, 10 — 24; S. B.E.. vol. xxiii. pp. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 367 

by the Turvasu, who brought the gods and national customs 
of India to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean coasts. 
Thus Shesh-ai is the wet-god Shesh or Sek Nag, the 
spring-god of the Takka triad. Ahiman, the Egyptian Ahi, 
a name of Osiris and the Sanskrit form of Echis, the holding 
snake, the European Vritra, the encloser, and the equivalent 
of the Takka Vasuk, or Basuk Nag, the snake-god Vasuki, 
while Talmai is the mother Tal, the female form of the 
Akkadian Tal-tal, the very wise one of the name of la «. 
He is the counter-part of the Takka Takshaka, or Taksh 
Nag, the biting-snake of winter. It was to these three 
seasons that Caleb, as the god of this year, added the fourth 
season of this year, and commemorated the institution of 
this new measure of time by calling Hebron the capital 
of the tribe of Judah, the parent-altar-fire of Caleb, Kiriath- 
Arba, the city of the four 2. This was the year ruled by four 
Akkadian stars of the seven Lu-masi 3 : (1) Kakshisha, the 
horn (ski) star {ska), the door (kak) Sirius, the star of sum- 
mer. (2) En-te-na-mas-luv Hydra, the divine (en) founda- 
tion (te) of the prince (no) of the black (luv) antelope (mas), 
the star of the rainy autumn. (3) Ta-khu or Id-khu, the 
creating (id) mother-bird (khu), the winter-star. (4) Papil- 
sak, the sceptre (pa), the wet or great (sak) fire (///), the star 
of spring 4. In the theology of this year Masu^the Hebrew 
Moses, the leader of Caleb and the Israelites, was the star 
Regulus 5. — This was the year of the ape with the lion's 
taiTaepicted on the banner of Arjuna when he defeated the 
Kauravyas, rulers of this year with Uttara, the North-god 
of the summer solstice, as his charioteer. This year was 
led by the dog of the Pandavas, the last surviving com- 

1 Sayce, Assyrian Grammar, Syllabary No. 16. 

2 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 189, note 2. 

3 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., ' Euphratean Stellar Researches,' ii., Tablets W, 
A, I, iii., lvii., No. 6, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaology, May, 
i893» P- 328. 

4 Hewitt, Rtding Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 370—372.: 

5 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. i. p. 49. 



368 History and Chronology 

panion of Yudishthira when he went up to heaven at the 
close of his career to join his brethren, its dead seasons 
His faithful dog was changed into the star Sirius, the chief 
minister of the god Dharma, the Pole Star god *, author 
of law and order [dharm), and of the unvarying sequence 
of national phenomena, the Egyptain goddess Ma'at, the 
Pole Star Vega in Lyra from io.ooo to 8000 B.C. 

But in order to understand fully the story of Caleb and 
to realise his connection with this year, we must turn to 
the historical chronicles compiled for oral recitation and 
transmitted by the national reciters of the countries in which 
the trading Turvasu or Yavanas of India became the ruling 
powers. They brought with them their eleven-months year, 
which they established as the official year of all lands where 
they ruled, the sea-coasts from India to Britany. And 
in this last country we have seen that this year is com- 
memorated in the calendar of the eleven rows of stones 
at Menec, near Carnac, in Britany, in which the year-gnomon- 
stone was oriented to the rising sun of the summer solstice. 
One of the historical stories in which they recorded the 
history of this year and its foundation on the substructure 
of the three-years cycle with its forty months, is the widely 
disseminated tale of the Two Thieves who stole the king's 
treasure. Variants of this story, which is told in Herodotus 
ii. 121, of the robbery of the treasure of Rhampsinitus, king 
of Egypt, are found in India, in story No. 2 in the Katha 
Sarit Sagara, and No. 11 of Lai Behari Dey's Folk Tales 
of Bengal*. But the two forms of this story, which was 
intended to portray graphically the history of the great 
revolution in time-reckoning wrought by the Indian and 
Phoenician trading guilds when they substituted the year of 
eleven-months for the three-years cycle, are those of Tropho- 
nius and Agamedes, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. 
Trophonius and Agamedes were sons of Erginus, king of the 

1 Mahabharata Mahaprashthanika Parva, iii. 17, p. 8. 

2 For other variants see list in Frazers' Pausanias, vol. v. pp. 176—179. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 369 

Minyans, a form of the snake-god Ericthonius, the god 
Poseidon. They were noted builders, who built the sanc- 
tuary of their father Poseidon near Mantinaea, and the bridal 
chamber of Alkmene, the goddess of the moon-bow (alk, arc) 
mother, the sun-god Herakles \ But the building which 
indicates most clearly their historical position as star-year- 
gods of a year measured by nights, who marked the stages 
in heaven through which the sun-god was to run his annual 
course, is the treasury of King Hyrieus at Delphi, of which 
they were the architects. In this, like the pyramid thieves 
of the story of Rhampsinitus, they contrived that one of the 
stones could be removed from the outside so that they might 
enter and pilfer the hoard every night. This treasure 
was that of the god of the bee - hive or vault of heaven, 
called Hyrieus [vplevs from vpov, a hive, vpiov, honey-comb). 
This was the Pole Star god ruling the bee-hive of Mord- 
vin theology, described in Chapter IV. p. 169. In this 
world's temple of the bees, the star-gods of heaven, the 
priests and priestesses who uttered the commands and 
counsel of the father-god in oracles were the working-bees. 
These were the Greek Melissai, the bees, the official name 
of the priestesses of the mother-goddess of Ephesus, of De- 
meter and Persephone. The Semite prophet priestesses are 
commemorated under the name of Deborah, the bee of 
the date-palm-tree, the nurse of Rebekah, the mother of 
Isaac {laughter), the blind god of the laughing corn of 
harvest, who ruled Israel with Barak, the lightning-god, 
the Centaur-god of the heavenly bow. She was buried at 
Bethel under the Oak of Weeping (Allon- bacuth) 2 , after 
Jacob, the supplanter sun-god, had destroyed the idols and 
false gods of the Pole Star god, his predecessor. Thus 
she was the mother-year-goddess, the queen bee, whose 
annual death was lamented at her year's end, like that of 
Dumuzi. It was the prophet star-bees, the measurers of 



1 Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 37, 4, 5, viii. 10, 2, ix. II, 1, vol. i. 

2 Ibid., vol. iv. pp. 223, 224; Gen. xxxv. 1 — 8 ; Judges iv. 4 ff . v. 

B b 



370 History and Chronology 

the year, who nursed the young Zeus in Crete as the son 
of Rhea, the tree-mother of the sons of the rivers. The 
hive of these holy bees, the over-arching heavens, was the 
tower of the three-year cycle, and it was in the age of 
the cycle-year that the article of the national creed was 
made requiring belief in the world as a bee-hive, whence 
honey was taken for the preparation of the inspiring mead 
and for generating physical and mental life on earth. 

This conclusion will be made still more clear by examin- 
ing the story of AH Baba and the Forty Thieves. The latter, 
whose number is the same as that of the months of the cycle- 
year, had buried their treasure in a cave, the dark amphi- 
theatre of the night sky, the cave of Cybele. Ali Baba, who 
found it, was a poor wood-cutter with three asses, those which 
drew the car of the Ashvins, the three seasons of the year of 
the three-legged ass of the Zendavesta. His brother, Kasim, 
whose name means the collector of tribute in kind T , was 
wealthy and prosperous. They signify the two seasons of 
the equinoctial year of the cycle, the despised season of 
winter, beginning at the autumnal and the wealthy season 
of spring, and summer beginning at the vernal equinox. 
It was at the autumnal equinox that the treasure was dis- 
covered. When Ali Baba came tfpon the thieves he watched 
them from a hiding-place, and learnt that they opened the 
door of the treasure-house by saying Open Sesame, and shut 
it by saying Shut Sesame. Thus this discoverer is the 
ruling twin of the eleven-months year of the oil growers 
whose sacred plant was the Sesamum Orientale. When Ali 
Baba's brother Kasim discovered his brother's good fortune, 
and was told the secret of the pass-word, he took ten mules, 
the ten sexless months of gestation of the cycle-year, to the 
cave, which he opened by calling out Open Sesame, and shut 
it by saying Shut Sesame. But when after taking ten mule- 
loads of treasure he wanted to return, he forgot the pass- 
word, and called out Open Barley, showing that he was the 

1 Burton, Arabian Nights, vol, xii. p. 13, note 2. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 371 

summer and autumn god of the barley - growers whose 
revenue he collected. He was found in the cave, and 
slain as the autumn harvest-god by the forty thieves 
of the cycle-year, and they divided his body into two 
parts, which they hung up on each side of the cave door 
as the twin door-posts of the holy temple of the Garden 
of God opening at the autumnal equinox, when the cycle- 
year began. 

AH Baba, the ruling twin of the eleven-months year, 
removed these gate-posts of the cycle-age, and was sought 
after by the thieves as the unknown destroyer of their 
carefully constructed clock of time. They were baffled and 
finally slain by Marjanah, the maid-servant of Kasim, whose 
name means red-coral. She, who was the slayer of the forty 
cycle-months or thieves, was the fish-sun-mother of the sun- 
god conceived at its close, who married AH Baba's son, the 
sun-god of the winter solstice r . She was the sea-mother- 
goddess, the counterpart of Thetis, the ocean-mud (t/zz'th), 
who, as the Black Demeter of Phigalia in Arcadia, with the 
horse's head of the black-horse-god Dadhiank, bore the 
sun-god of this eleven-months year 2 to Poseidon, the god 
who gave the sun-horses to Peleus. 

When we return to the story of Trophonius and Agamedes, 
sons of Erectheus Poseidon, the Greek AH Baba and Kasim, 
we find still further evidence connecting the robbery of the 
treasure with the substitution of the eleven-months year of 
the sun-god, with the horse's head for the cycle-year. These 
twin robbers of the treasury they built were the counterparts 
of the Hindu Ashvins, the stars Gemini who ruled both the 
cycle and the eleven-months year, the two door-posts of the 
House of God. Agamedes, like Kasim, was caught in a snare, 
from which he could not be freed, and slain by his brother, 
who cut off his head to escape detection, as AH Baba carried 

1 Burton, Arabian Nights, ' Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,' vol. x. pp. 
209 ff., 216, note I, 234. 

2 Berard, Origine dcs Cidtcs Arcadiens, ii., Les Deesses, pp. 104 — 109 ; 
Frazer, Pausanias, viii., xlii. pp. 428, 429. 

B b 2 



372 History and Chronology 

away his brother's body. According to Pausanias, as 
Trophonius carried away his brother's head the earth opened 
and received Trophonius in the sacrificial pit consecrated to 
Agamedes, the Hindu Pole Star goat (a/a), in which a black 
ram was offered to him as the ram-sun-god of the cycle-year 
slain at its close x . 

As for Trophonius, he is the god worshipped at Lebadea 
in Bceotia as Zeus Trophonius, the Phoenician Baal Tropha, 
the healing-god 2 . His cave and grove, which were frequented 
by worshippers who sought advice from his oracles, and who 
wore at his shrine shoes made of the skins of animals sacri- 
ficed to him 3, were on the river Hercyna, that of the goddess 
Erycina, the Phoenician Erek Hayim, the preserving goddess, 
the star Virgo. She, according to the legend told by Pausanias, 
was the goddess holding the goose, the Hindu' Kansa, the 
goose-king of this epoch which fled from her to Persephone, 
who, as the autumn mother of the goose-god born from the 
sun-god, hid it under a stone 4. 

This goose layer of the sun-egg was the Egyptian god or 
goddess who laid the egg of Nekekur the Great Cackler 
under the great sycamore-tree, in the sacred sun-city of On. 
She is called also the star (seb) god Seb, who laid the egg 
in the growth of which Osiris lives 5, This egg laid by the 
star-god is the egg of the god Bes, a form of Seb, whose 
ancient name is Bes-bes the goose 6 . He or she is called in 
the Book of the Dead the being within the sixteenth Pylon, 
or gate of the gods through which the soul of Ani passes, 
the Lady of Victory who burneth with flames of fire (Bes), 
creator of the mysteries of the earth 7. That is to say, she 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, ix. 37, 2, 3, 39, 4, vol. i. pp. 490, 491, 493, 494, 
vol. v. p. 201. 

2 Ibid., vol. v. p. 197 ; Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, pp. 293, 294. 

3 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. pp. 202, 203. 

4 Ibid., ix. 39, 1, 2, vol. i. pp. 492, 493. 

s Budge, Book of the Dead, chaps, liv., lix. pp. 105, 108, 109. 

6 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien sEgygtef; pp. 172, 173, 576, 
577- 

7 Budge, Book of the Dead, chap. cxlv. 56, Translation, p. 250, Text, p. 344. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 373 

is the goddess of the South, the fire-mother who heats into 
life the egg she is to lay, that of the Southern ape or raven- 
god of the mother constellation Argo. This god Bes is, as 
we have seen, the god in the form of the ape with the lion's 
tail, who follows and succeeds the ape-god Hi, the Southern 
god *. He bears a sacrificial knife in each hand, representing 
the lunar phases of the months of this year. He is the 
counterpart of the ape with the lion's tail on the banner of 
the sexless Arjuna, ruling the year of the four Akkadian 
stars: 1. Kakshisha, Sirius ; 2. Entenamasluv, Hydra; 
3. Takhu or Id-khu, Aquila ; 4. Pa-pil-sak, Leo ; the year 
of the prince (na) of the black (luv) antelope {mas), the god 
of the rains of Hydra the water-snake, that of the black 
antelope-god Krishna, Arjuna's charioteer in the final contest 
with the Kauravyas, the god of the year in which the world's 
egg was laid. 

This year in Hindu history is that in which Gandharl, the 
vulture-mother of the Kauravyas, laid the egg from which 
her hundred sons, the rulers of the world, were born. She 
is the Pole Star mother, the star Vega a Lyrae. This egg, 
we are told in the Mahabharata, remained for two years 
in Gandhari's womb, and its offspring remained two more 
years in holy water and clarified butter before they came 
to life. Hence the children born of the egg were the off- 
spring of the four divisions, each of ten lunar months, of 
gestation of the cycle-year. It was laid simultaneously with 
the birth of Yudishthira, the eldest Pandava son of Kunti 
or Prithi, the lance or conceiving {pent) mother of the 
Parthavas and Dharma, the Pole Star god. Yudishthira was 
born on the fifth day of Khartik (October — November), about 
the 20th of October, under the constellation Jaistha Scorpio, 
and the star Antares a Scorpio at the Muhurta or hour 
sacred to the star Abhijit ( Vega) 2 . 

1 Gardiner Wilkinson, The Ancient Egyptians, vol. iii. pp. 148, 150, Fig. 

535- 

- Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxv., cxxiii. pp. 338, 359. There 
is a difficulty here about dates. We have seen in the history of the birth of 



374 History and Chronology 

Hence the beginning of the year when the world's egg 
was laid coincided with the year opening with the sacrifice 
of the Roman horse on the 15th of October, and it began 
twenty-one days earlier than the birth of Arishtanemi or 
in the lunar phase preceding it. He was the goose {Kansa) 
son of Ugrasena, who was born on the 12th day of the dark 
fortnight of Khartik (October — November), or about the 
13th of November; and who like Duryodhana, the eldest 
Kauravya, was a ruling-god of this eleven-months year. 
This was also the month sacred to Trophonius, the robber 
of the treasury, who as the god of the river of Erycina or 
Erek-hayim, the goose-mother, the son of the egg, which 
in another form was that from which Castor and Poludeukes, 
the sons of Leda, were born. 

But this star- mother Erek-hayim was, as we have seen, 
the star Virgo, which, as the sun-star, ruled the mid-month 
of this year, beginning on the 15th of October and com- 
mencing its second period of six months at the Roman 
festival of the Fordicidia on the 15th of April. This was 
the Hindu year beginning on the 1st of Baisakh (April — 
May), and that succeeding the year mentioned in the alter- 
native account of Arishtanemi's birth, which fixed it at the 
vernal equinox when the sun was in Virgo. The year when 
the sun was in Virgo at the 15th of April was about 10,200 
B.C., or about the time when Vega began to be the Pole Star, 
under which Yudishthira and the Kauravyas were born. It 
was also a year consecrated to Antares a Scorpio, called 

Arishta-nemi, pp. 316—318, that he was quickened in Khartik and born in Cheit 
(March— April), when the sun was in Virgo, about 12,200 B.C. If we apply 
similar reasoning to the date of the birth of the Kauravyas and Yudishthira in 
order that they should be born under Scorpio in 12,200, they must be bora 
in May— June, the month Jaistha, in which the sun was in that constellation. 
They might, when born at the end of this month, the summer solstice, be 
conceived at the beginning of Khartik (October— November). The difficulty 
cannot be cleared up without a full examination of the texts, but in spite of 
this difficulty the connection between the births of the Pandava, Yudishthira, 
and Arishta-nemi is clear. Both were born about 12,200 B.C., and Yudishthira 
apparently in Jaistha, May— June, at the summer solstice. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 375 

in the Akkadian Tablet of the Thirty Stars the Lord of 
Seed of the month Tisri (September —October), that is, the 
Lord of its offspring, the star of the storm, Zu bird, Lugal- 
tudda z , the layer of the autumnal egg. 

This star heralding the season of the autumnal equinox 
in India and Babylonia also fulfilled a similar function in 
Egypt and Greece, where temples erected for the worship 
of a year-god whose year, like that of the three-years cycle, 
began at this date. It was regarded in Egypt as an equi- 
noctial star, marking the setting of the sun at the vernal 
and its rising at the autumnal equinox 2 . It was to this star 
that the great temple of Here, the Herceum, at Argos was 
oriented 3. Also as marking the connection of this year of 
Trophonius with the star Spica a Virgo, I may notice that 
in Egypt this star, called Min or Khim, was also looked on 
as that of a mummy-goddess who ruled the years beginning 
with setting stars, and Sir Norman Lockyer concludes from 
the orientation of the temples dedicated to this star that 
they celebrated the worship of a god whose year began 
on the 1st May 4. This was the year of Persephone, the 
year of the Pleiades epoch, who appears, as we have seen, 
in the Trophonius legend. We thus see in this long analysis 
of ancient mythologies and astronomical legends that the 
age of the three-years cycle was that of the primaeval bee- 
hive robbed and conquered by the twin-gods of the eleven- 
months year which succeeded it. Also that this year is that 
ruled by the Pole Star Vega of the Vulture constellation, 
who ushered in this new year about 10,000 B.C. by hatching 
the world's egg, from whence the Kauravyas who were to rule 
it were born. That this date of the birth of the Kauravyas 
coincided with that of Yudishthira, the Pandava ruler, and 
with the New Year's Day of this year beginning with the 

1 R. Brown, jun., F. S.A., Primitive Constellations, 'Tablet of the Thirty 
Stars,' vol. ii., Antares, xxiv. pp. 88, 89. 

2 Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. xxx. p. 314. 
s Ibid., pp. 289, 308, 360, 388, 419. 

4 Ibid., chap. xxxi. pp. 318, 319. 



Sy6 History and Chronology 

sacrifice of the sun-horse at the Roman Equiria on the 15th 
of October. This was also the year of the ape with the 
lion's tail, borne by the sexless god Arjuna, the chief warrior 
of the Pandavas. 

As the year of the ape with the lion's tail was that begun 
under the auspices of the star Sirius, the star of Caleb, 
the conquering dog {kalb) star of the tribe of Judah, it 
was that in which he and Joshua or Hoshea, the Ya or 
Yahveh of the Hus or Hushim, the Danava sons of Dan, 
after wandering for forty years in the wilderness (the forty 
months of the cycle-year) broke into and conquered the 
treasure-house of the bees ruled by Deborah, the queen-bee. 
This land flowing with milk and honey was that discovered 
by these two spies or thieves who had dwelt in it for 
forty days x . This conquest was made after the death of 
Moses or Masu, the star Regulus in Leo which ruled the 
last season of this year. This is the constellation which lies 
due south of the pointer-stars of the Great Bear, that called 
by the Akkadians Su-gi, the spirit-reed (gi) of the Su bird, 
the reed-cradle in which he, with his Kushite wife Zipporah, 
the little bird, was guarded in his infancy by his virgin-sister 
Miriam, the Greek Mariam, the Hindu Mari-amma, the 
prophet-star Virgo which precedes Leo in the zodiacal list 
of stars 2 . The birth-story of Moses is parallel with that 
of Kavad, the ancestor of the Kushite kings, who was found 
as an infant in the reeds of the lake Kushava or Zarah 
by Uzava, the goat Pole Star god. The constellation Leo, 
as ruler of the year, died on Mount Nebo, sacred to the 
prophet-god of that name, the planet Mercury, which was 
to herald the birth of the sun-god of Chapter VII., the 



1 Numbers xiii. 33, 34. 

2 Ibid. xii. 1 ; Exodus ii. 2 — 4, 21 ; Gesenius, Thesaurus, p. 819, derives 
the Hebrew Miriam from the Greek Mariam, and the last is certainly the same 
word as. the Hindu Tamil Mariamma, the mother (amma), Mari, the tree 
[marom) mother. Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., 
pp. 357 — 362, where the history of the constellations of the Great Bear and 
Virgo is discussed at length. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 377 

god of the eight-rayed star. These invaders acquired the 
lands ruled by Og, the king of the Rephaim of Bashan, who 
was, as we have seen, the god of the revolving year-bed 
of the heavens or beehive-house of God. Their leader was 
Hoshea, the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim r , or the 
two ashes {ephrd), the united sons of Jacob, the supplanting 
sun-god of the pillar of Bethel and husband of Leah, the 
wild (/<?) cow-mother with the weak eyes, the three-eyed 
mother Gauri, wife of Shiva, and of Joseph or Asipu, 
the son of Rachel the ewe, the ram-sun-god. Nun, the 
father of Hoshea, was the chief god of the four creating 
male and female pairs of the lunar-solar Egyptian mythology 
who were led and inspired by Thoth or Dhu-ti, the moon- 
bird (dhu) of life {ti), and formed by Chnum the artificer, 
the Great Potter, the soul of Shu, the fire-god. They were 
called Nun, Nunet, Heh, Hehet, Kek, Keket, Gorh, Gorhet, 
the spirits of the air and the earth. They are the embodi- 
ment of the theology of the Mehueret cow, the year-cow 
of the year of three seasons made by the Ribhus, manifested 
in Nunet, the vulture-wife of Nun, the water or cloud-god 2 . 
They were the metaphysical form of the earliest eight gods 
of the fire-worshippers : (1) Shu, the heat ; (2) Tefnut, the 
effluence or flame ; (3) Seb, the star or egg ; (4) Nut, the 
over-arching heaven; (5) Osiris, Orion; (6) Isis, the moun- 
tain (z's) goddess ; (7) Set, the ape-star Canopus first, and 
afterwards the Pole Star in Kepheus ; and (8) Nebh-hat, 
the mistress of the house, the tender of the sacred fire and 
the Pole Star mother-goddess, wife of Set. 

It was from these eight parent-gods that Horus the young 
sun-god was born, the god depicted on the square zodiac 
at Denderah as ruling the equinoctial points North, South, 
East and West of the planisphere or eight-partitioned plan 
of the heavens drawn on the panther's hide, the sacred 
garment of the Egyptian priests. In this the stars are 

1 Numbers xiii. S. 

- Brugsch, Religion unci Mythologie dcr Altai sEgyplcr, pp. 116, 123, 124, 
444, 469. 



378 History and Chronology 

placed in their respective quarters in the sky, and the mother 
of Horus Hathor or Nebt-hat rule the intermediate North- 
east, South-west, South-east, North-west points, those marking 
the St. Andrew's Cross indicating the yearly circuit of the 
sun-bird. Thus Horus, who is represented on the walls 
of the temple as born from the womb of the Pole Star 
goddess, is the son of the eight-rayed star *. 

The Hebrew Hoshea is thus, as the son of Nun and 
the eight, the counterpart of the Egyptian Horus born 
of the Pole Star, and his mother was Nunet, the Vulture 
Pole Star Vega, while his father Nun was the ocean-god 
Num of the Finn Samoyedes, who divided the rule of the 
world between Jumala, the heaven god, and Num, the water 
god 2 . He was also a god of the Ugro-Finn Akkadians 
of Eiam, the land of the great Naga snake Susi-Nag, for 
Elam, the South-eastern land of Akkadian geography, is 
called Mat Num-maki, the land of the lady (mak) Nun 3. 
The name of the god or goddess of the sun of the winter 
solstice rising in the South-east is indicated by the cuneiform 
symbol >_YYy>», meaning the three gods >-, the Assyrian 
Rabu, the Hebrew Rabbi, the Hindu Ribhus. This parent 
of the sun-god was in Hebrew belief the fish-mother-goddess, 
for Nun means a fish in Hebrew. In other words, she was 
the goddess Tirhatha, or the cleft, the pool who was originally 
the mother Bahu who gave birth to the sun -god born from 
the mother-tree grown in her ocean mud. 

It was under the two robber leaders, the dog-star Sirius 
and the young sun-god succeeding the lion-star, the ape 
with the lion's tail, that Jericho, the moon or yellow {Yarah 
Yareh) city, was betrayed by Rahab, the crocodile-mother, 
the constellation Draco, who admitted the two spies or 



1 Marsham Adams, The Book of the Master of the Secret House, chap, vi., 
The Temple of the Virgin-Mother, pp. 71 — 73. 

- Max Miilier, Contributions to the Science oj Mythology,, vol. i. p. 261. 

3 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Primitive Constellations, vol. ii. chap. xiv. pp. 
163 — 165; Sayce, Assyrian Grammar: Syllabary Sign 361,498. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 379 

thieves sent by Hoshea * to rob the Treasury of the heavens, 
of which this constellation was the crown and keystone. 
It was the Hindu Shunshu-mara of which the stars Gemini 
were the hands, the alligator, the constellation Vyasa, the 
parents of the fathers of the Kauravyas and Pandavas 
Dritarashtra and Pandu. Rahab, the crocodile constellation 
which, like Trophonius, connived at the robbery of the 
treasure-house she built, was converted into a mother-star 
of the new solar worship, and became the mother of Boaz 2 , 
the sun-pillar of the twin-pillars Jachin and Boaz before the 
temple at Jerusalem. 

The city fell before the blast of the trumpets of rams' 
horns ushering in the cycle-year, which also proclaimed 
its fall, and the birth of the sun successor of its interlop- 
ing follower, the eleven-months year of the horse's head. 
This conquest was effected after the erection of Gilgal, the 
circle of year-stones, the pillar - girdle of Hir-men-sol, the 
sun-god of the great stone {men). 

The seven trumpets of rams' horns which overthrew the 
walls of the moon-city were the seven stars of the Bear- 
mother of the ram-sun, born, as we shall see in Chapter 
VII., of the Bear thigh. It was encompassed six times on 
the first six days of the siege, the six days of the Hittite 
week, and on the seventh day it was encompassed seven 
times. The number thirteen refers to the thirteen months 
of the year, the thirteen children of Jacob, to be described 
in Chapter VIII. 

The ancient date of this change of ritual from Pole Star 
and moon worship to that of the sun-god is shown by the 
rite of circumcision which Hoshea required all the Israel- 
ites to undergo. By this rite the sun-worshippers united 
themselves to the land of their adoption by mingling their 
blood with its soil, and its antiquity is indicated by the 
stone or flint knives used by Joshua, which, according to 
the Septuagint version of the account of his burial, were 
buried with him 3. 

1 Joshua ii. — vi. - Matthew i. 6. 3 Joshua v. 2 ; xxiv. 30. 



380 History mid Chronology 

The place of this revolution in Hebrew traditional history- 
is shown in the historical genealogy of the kings of Edom, 
to which I have referred previously. Boaz of the golden 
pillar, the husband of Rahab, was the counterpart of Samlah 
of Masrekah, the vine-land, the Phoenician Pen Samlah, or 
the face of the God of the Name (S/iem), the prophet pillar 
Samuel, the son of Hannah, the fig-tree from which the phalli 
of Dionysus were made r . He is otherwise called Penuel, 
the face of God. This was the gnomon image of the 
young Dionysus, son of Semele or Samlath, the god of 
the conical towers of Penuel which Gideon destroyed. His 
successor was Shaul of Rehoboth by the river Euphrates, 
the squares and suburbs of Babylon, where Shaul or Shawul 
was the sun-god 2 . 

Shaul was the Saul of Hebrew history consecrated by 
Samuel, who inaugurated his rule as god of the year by 
setting up as his monument the symbol of the hand of 
the five-day weeks 3. He is the pillar-chief of the prophet- 
priests of the Ephod, who was succeeded by the sun-god 
of the eight-rayed star-father of the later year-kings, the 
sun-god who drove his year chariot through the heavens, 
independently of the Pole Star, following the path marked 
out for him by the Zodiacal Stars. This was the sun-god 
Dod or Dodo, the beloved-one, the eighth son of Jesse or 
Ishai, meaning He who is. He is called Baal Hanan in 
Gen. xxxvi. 38, and in 2 Samuel xxi. 19, xxiii. 24, El- 
hanan, the son of Dodo of Bethlehem, who slew the great 
Goliath, the chief of the Rephaim, or sons of the giant 
(Repha), the star Canopus. In Genesis xxxvi. 38, he is 
called the son of Achbor, the mouse, that is of Apollo 
Smintheus, the mouse, and his name Baal Hanan means 
the merciful or pitying-god, the sun-physician, the Phceni- 



1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 24, 25. 

- Gen. xxxvi. 37, 38 ; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1SS7, Lect i. pp. 54, 55. 
3 1 Samuel xv. 12. The word monument in our version, the Hebrew jadh, 
means, as noted in the margin, a hand. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 381 

cian Eshmun, the Greek healing-god ^Esculapius, the son 
of the Indian snake and sun-cock sacrificed to him. This 
god, who introduced the new form of solar worship, will 
form the subject of the next chapter. 



BOOK III. 
SOLAR WORSHIP. 



CHAPTER VII. 

The fifteen - months year of the sun - god of the 
eight-rayed star and the eight-days week. 

THE period now arrived at in this review of the history 
of human progress and national education Is one which 
discloses to us the completion of the stage of development 
occupying the epoch of lunar solar worship of the three- 
years cycle and of the eleven-months years measured by 
weeks of nine and eleven days. The social organisation 
of this age of transition was still, as in the days of the 
Pleiades year, based on the system of village and provin- 
cial governments, which gave each village and province 
the control of its own affairs, provided they did not injure 
those of their neighbours. The diffusion of this underlying 
principle of public policy studded during this period the 
whole of India, the coast-lands on the North of the Indian 
Ocean, the villages of the Euphrates and Tigris, Egypt, 
Syria, Armenia and Asia Minor, with provinces formed by 
the union of village communities. In the most prosperous 
of these regions, those watered by the Indus, Nerbudda, 
Jumna and Ganges in India, and the Euphrates and Tigris 
in Mesopotamia, the groups of allied provinces, which had 
become incorporated as separate confederacies, were con- 
trolled by imperial princes who, as national law-givers, ruled 
the province forming the centre of each confederated as- 
sociation of united states. The city which was the head- 
quarters of the central ruler became, like Kashi and Babylon, 
the parent-village of the confederacy, the site of the national 



History and Chronology of the Myth-Making Age. 383 

High Place or Akropolis, and its most sacred shrine the altar 
of the great mother. Of this centralising theocracy Delphi, 
the womb (SeX^fc) of the Dorians, and Jerusalem, the holy 
mountain of the Semites, are the most conspicuous survivals. 
Under the control of these princes and their counsellors 
society was, in the ages through which it reached the stage at 
which we have now arrived, ruled by the village and provin- 
cial elders who, besides doing the every-day duties of govern- 
ment, superintended the education of each fresh genera- 
tion of young men and women who were born as children 
of their respective villages. These were trained as successors 
to those who brought them up, and taught to continue their 
inherited policy of conservative veneration for the past 
and of careful and slow advance to new progressive improve- 
ments. 

The original village organisation was, to a certain ex- 
tent, succeeded by that of the commercial guilds which ' 
superintended all handicrafts and productive trades, and 
watched over and developed the internal interchange of local 
products conducted in the weekly markets and annual fairs 
held at selected sites distributed over the country. This 
supervision of internal commerce developed, as wealth and 
enterprise increased, into that of the foreign and maritime 
trade which followed the river and valley highways, and 
the ocean coasts. Under the guidance of these guilds the 
traders of India, known as the Tur-vasu, had penetrated 
into Persia, the Euphratean countries, Arabia, Egypt and 
Syria, and joined the descendants of the earlier Indian 
emigrants who had settled as farmers on the coasts of the 
Mediterranean. Thence they had passed through Greece 
and Italy to the extremities of Europe. In their advance 
they founded the village communities of the Neolithic Age 
which grew into inland cities and trading centres, such 
as Kashi and Takka-sila in the interior, and Tamra-lipti, 
Baragyza, Dwarika and Patala on the coasts of India; Eridu, 
Girsu and Haran or Kharran in Mesopotamia ; on the coasts 
of the Mediterranean Ashkelon, Jebail Gi-bil or Bil-gi, 



384 History and Chronology 

consecrated to the Akkadian fire-god Bil-gi, called by the 
Greeks Byb-los, apparently the earliest Phoenician port in 
Syria, Smyrna and Troy. In Greece Orchomenus, Tiryns, 
and the prehistoric Akropolis of Athens, Gnossos, the capital 
of Minos in Crete ; and in Italy the Umbrian port of Caere 
or Agylla, and the Tyrrhenian Tarquinium, the sacred 
city of Tarchon Tages or Terie'gh, the child who rose from 
the furrow as the son of the European form of the Indian 
year-mother Sita, the disseminator of the astronomy of his 
father Rama, and who was the child of the original snake 
constellation of Draco. These pioneers of maritime trade 
had also passed through Gades, the city of the apples of the 
Hesperides, and the Gates of Hercules to Britany, where 
their sepulchral mounds, menhirs, sun-circles and stone 
calendars show indubitable traces of their occupation of 
the coasts of the French Cornouaille, which were a stepping- 
stone to the tin lands of Cornwall, the ancient Kassiterides 
or tin islands. 

Throughout the long series of ages fresh breeds and types 
of character had been formed by the intermingling of 
different stocks of emigrant races, but the process of growth 
had been generally peaceful till the arrival of the Northern 
sons of the sun-horse, who had taken possession as con- 
querors of the lands into which they introduced their new 
beliefs. They had by their arbitrary dealings with the people 
they subjugated prepared, during the age of the eleven- 
months year, the way for the revolution which was to end 
in the worship of the sun-god as the successor to the Pole 
Star. 

It was to these military conquerors that the world owes 
the development of individual character begun among the 
North-western Goths or sons of the bull {gut or got), the race 
of cattle herdsmen who based their national organisation 
on family property, and divided their land not into village 
communities but into tracts owned by the families united 
to form tribal territories, as the village communities formed 
provinces, 



of the Myth- Making Age. 385 

These men were the Teutonic Frisians and Saxons, 
described by Tacitus, who says of them 1 : "They cannot 
"endure houses close to one another; scattered and separated 
" they settle where attracted by a spring, a pasture, or a 
"grove. Their villages are not arranged as among us 
"Romans with united dependent buildings. Each man 
" surrounds his house with an open courtyard, from fear of 
" fire or ignorance how to build. They do not use stones 
" or tiles, but employ a common material (kneaded clay), 
"without show or value." 

These people are essentially different from the Southern 
Suevi or Swabians, who, as Tacitus says 2 , " have no private 
" or separate fields with proper boundaries, and the magis- 
trate and princes divide the land annually in proportion, 
"while the village tenants of the lord," like the members 
of the Indian village community who do not belong to the 
official families, " each occupies his own house, and pays 
"a tribute of corn, cattle, and flax." 

Tacitus here describes a community like those of the 
Central and Southern Indian villages, which has reached 
the stage of cultivating common lands, for which rent is paid 
in kind, as described in Chapters IV. and V. 

In the North-west provinces of India we find that the 
most common tenures are those of the Jat villages, in which 
each farmer cultivates with his family his own hof or house 
and farm garden and his compact fields, all forming one 
separate farm, and not intermixed with the holdings of their 
neighbours as in the communal village lands. In the lands 
of North-west Europe, where the prototype of these holdings 
has existed from time immemorial, several scattered farms 
form a Bauerschaft, which generally bears the name of the 
oldest and most honoured Hof. Its proprietor is called 
Hauptman, Headman, or Captain, and his house is the 
Recht Hof or Court of Judgment, the meeting-place of the 
tribe, analogous to, but differing from, the Gemeinde Haus 

1 Tacitus, Gerpiania, 16. 2 Ibid., 25, 26. 

C C 



386 History and Chronology 

of the communal village, which is common and not indi- 
vidual property. This Bauerschaft of the Low Germans is 
similar to the Bratsvo or community of brothers of the 
Southern Slavs, as described by Schrader J . 

Each Bratsvo owns a landed estate, of which each family 
owns a definite and compact portion. The number of men 
capable of bearing arms in a Bratsvo vary from about thirty 
to eight hundred, and the families to which they belong 
occupy one or more villages like the Uchelwyr and Bonne- 
cligion, the corresponding class among the Goidelic Celts. 
They fight side by side in battle, and their leader is chosen 
by the Bratsvenici. 

These people, the Goths of Gothland, the Getse of the 
Balkan country and Asia Minor, became in India the Jats 
or Cheroos who hold Pattidari villages divided into different 
shares of land held by each family forming the village com- 
munity. They, like the Getse of Armenia, described by 
Herodotus i. 216, worshipped the sun-god, to whom they 
offered horses. The Jats in India are divided into the Dhe 
Jats, called the Pachades or comers from the West {pack), 
and the Hele or Deshwali Jats, dwellers in the country 
{desk), who worship the god Ram, who has the plough for his 
weapon. They, like the ancient Hebrew sons of Shem, the 
Name, preserve the family and national history in the form of 
a mythic genealogy, prepared by bards called Jagas or Bhats. 
It was originally a history framed on principles similar to 
the recited chronicles of the priestly successors or assistants 
to the village elders, the priests called Prashastri or keepers 
of records which were verbal and not written. These became, 
as the careful preparation and remembrance of the original 
divine poems died out, under the rule of the Dhe Jats, the 
Brythonic followers of the Goidels, the family histories of 
distinguished individuals claimed as ancestors by the Brython 
tribes. It was these bards who took the place first assigned 



1 Jevon, Schrader's Prehistoric Antiquities of Aryans, Part iv., chap, xii., 
sect. iii. p. 397. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 387 

in the primitive constitutions to the teaching village elders. 
t The original or Hele Jats are also called Bhatti, or men 
of the bards, and Malwa Jats. They are the descendants 
of the latest immigrant Malli tribes, who gave their name 
to Malwa and Multan or Malli-thana, the place of the Mallis. 
It was while besieging this town in his war with the Malli 
and Kathaei or Kathi that Alexander the Great was wounded 1 . 
It was a great centre of sun-worship, and it was hither that, 
according to the Bhavishya Purana Samba, son of Krishna, 
which may be a representative name denoting the Shambara 
or Parthian men of the javelin, brought Magi from Saka- 
dvvipa, or the land of Seistan, to officiate in the temple of 
the sun at Multan 2 . 

The present chief representatives of these Malwa Jats in the 
Punjab are the Rajas of Putiala, Nabha and Jind, all of whom 
trace their descent to the Jat confederacy originally settled 
at Mahraj in the Ferozepur district. Their institutions were 
thoroughly republican, somewhat like those of the Spartans, 
for when they came under British protection they were not 
governed by Rajas but by a Panchayat Council of elders, like 
the Spartan Ephors chosen by the 6,728 Jat free-holders 3. 
These are the ruling officers said in the Mahabharata to 
be provincial governors. " The five brave and wise men 
employed in the five offices of protecting the city, the citadel, 
the merchants and agriculturists, and punishing criminals 4." 
Confederacies such as these were so careful of their inde- 
pendence that, like the people of Khytul belonging to the 
Mahraj group of states, they would not admit a tax-collector 
into their city, but paid their land revenue or rent over 
the wall ; and they were most particular in isolating them- 
selves from their neighbours. Thus the Jat village of 

1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, Multan, p. 238. 

2 A. Weber, India and the West in Old Days, p. 20 ; Hewitt, Early History 
of Northern India, Part ii. J.R.A.S., 1SS9, pp. 226, 250. 

3 Sir G. Campbell, Autobiography, vol. ii. p. 42 ; Hunter, Gazetteer, Mahraj, 
vol. ix. p. 184. 

* Mahabharata Sabha (Lokapalasabha-khyana) Parva, v. p. 17. 

C C 2 



3 88 History and Chronology 

Jagraon in the Ludhiana district was divided into eight 
Pattis or wards, Jagraon being in the centre ; and it and the 
seven circumjacent Pattis were all carefully fortified against 
each other 1 . These precautions recall the days when similar 
rivalry and isolation separated the dwellers on the seven 
hills of Rome, and when, as we have seen, the men of the 
quarter of the Palatine Via Sacra fought with those of 
the Suburra for the possession of the head of the horse 
sacrificed as the old year's horse at the Equiria. These 
customs, though they are permeated with the spirit of 
Northern isolation, yet show that those who lived under 
them had so far lost their original dread of contact with 
neighbours, who were possible foes, the " hostes " who were 
in Latin speech both enemies and strangers, as to live 
in walled towns and to borrow the Dravidian village insti- 
tutions, which entrusted the rule of the community to the 
village elders. 

Hence we see that though the Finno-Celts established 
their supremacy in the lands in which they settled by war 
and violence, and by trying to trample underfoot the cus- 
toms of the aboriginal inhabitants, yet they gradually 
amalgamated with them and instituted the habit of inter- 
marriages, which were first preceded by the forcible capture 
of the daughters of the land. In these marriages the union 
between the old and new settlers was made binding by inter- 
mingling the blood of the alien married partners. In the 
societies which grew up from this interfusion of races, the 
various modifications of the year-reckoning and the national 
ritual set forth in previous Chapters were evolved ; but 
in all these, as we have seen, the primaeval beliefs held a 
conspicuous place ; and the national histories represented 
the gods of the new ritual as directly descended from the 
first parents of the village races ; and everywhere the cloud- 
mother-bird Khu and the father-tree-ape were looked on 
as the ancestors of the new sun-god. In pursuance of this 
system we shall now see that the sun-god born as the ruler 

1 Sir G. Campbell, Autobiography, vol. ii. p. 52. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 389 

of this epoch was the son of the Thigh of the ape-father 
begotten from the cloud-bird-mother, who, as mother of 
the sun-physician ^Esculapius, was as Kor5nis, first the 
raven-mother and afterwards the annual garland of flowers 
born from the successive months of the year. 

A. The birth of the Sun-god born of 'the Thigh. 

The origin of this year of the son of the Thigh, adopted 
by these amalgamated Northern and Southern races after 
the year of eleven months, is distinctly explained in the 
Brahmanas in the instructions for lighting the fire on the 
year-altar. The first sacrificial fire kindled was that on 
the altar made in the form of a woman, and during its 
ignition eleven Samidheni or kindling stanzas were recited 
to the eleven gods ruling the eleven months of the year, 
those invoked in the eleven stanzas of the AprI hymns. 
But the ritual marking the supersession of the eleven- 
months year of the head of the sun-horse of night by that 
dedicated to the sun-god of day tells us in the only signi- 
fication that can be given to the words of the Brahmanas, 
that the change of year-reckonings was one from Pole Star 
to sun-worship, and that this was a natural evolution of 
the new from the old year. 

This is the obvious meaning of the new rule introduced 
by the innovators, that in kindling the sacrificial fires of this 
year the eleven Samidheni stanzas were to be recited as 
in the old ritual, but the first and last were each to be 
repeated thrice to make fifteen the number of months in 
the new year. These stanzas were to be in the Gayatrl 
metre of eight syllables in the line, and each of the fifteen 
contained three of these lines or twenty-four syllables. 
Hence the Samidheni hymn of fifteen stanzas was an epito- 
mised description of this year of fifteen months, each of 
twenty-four days, and three eight-day weeks *. Thus this 
year contained only 24 x 15, or three hundred and sixty 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 3, 5, 4 — 9 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 96, 97 note. 



390 History and Chronology 

days instead of the three hundred and sixty-three days 
of the eleven-months year. 

In order to realise the causes of this change, which was 
a reversal from the more correct year of Dadhiank to the 
Orion year of three hundred and sixty days, we must trace 
out the history of the revolution, and this we shall find 
in that of the parentage of the sun-god. He was called 
in all the mythologies of that age the son of the Thigh, that 
is of the Thigh of Set, the constellation of the Great Bear, 
the parent constellation of the Kushika who invaded India 
from the North, and which they called the seven Rishis 
or antelopes. This constellation ruled both the three-years 
cycle and the eleven-months year, and in the latter it was 
associated with Pegasus, the four stars of Pegasus being 
united with the seven stars of the Great Bear to symbolise 
its eleven months. 

But in the present year the sun-god, the Phoenician Esh- 
mun or eighth god, the Hindu Ashtaka, with the same 
meaning were substituted for the four stars of Pegasus, 
the four sons of Horus, and these eight gods ruled the eight- 
days week of this year, as the eleven stars of Pegasus and 
the Great Bear had ruled the eleven-days week of the 
previous year. This new god, the Phoenician Eshmun, the 
Akkadian Eshshu, was worshipped in Cyprus and Rhodes 
as Paian the healer, the sun-physician, and in the latter 
island his shrine on Mount Atabyrios was called that of Zeus 
Paian. This mountain is a reproduction of the Phoenician 
Mount Tabor * near the Sea of Galilee, on which hill of the 
oak-tree, the parent-tree of Deborah, the bee-prophetess, 
Saul prophesied after he had found the asses of his father 
the ass-sun-gods which drew the car of the Ashvins and 
Ravana of the cycle-year, and had been received by Samuel, 
as sun-king of the age of Ephod worship, at Ram ah, the 
High-place consecrated to Ram, the sun-god. It was at 
Ramah that he was declared to be the son of the Thigh, that 

1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 226, 26, Appius, xii. 27. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 39 1 

of the victim put on his plate as the thigh of the god of the 
dead year 1 . But this was the right thigh of the sun-father- 
god given to the Jewish prophet-priests of the house of 
Kohath 2 , and not the left, sacred to the Pole Star god, given, 
as we have seen in Chapter VI. pp. 332, 333, to the father-god, 
rider on the sun-horse, after the birth of the "child of the 
majesty of Indra." To trace the history of the god born of 
the Thigh we must go back to the' Mahabharata, where this 
god called Aurva, the son of the Thigh (uru), is said to 
be the son of Chyavana. Chyavana, whose name means 
"the moving one," was the personified fire-drill whose wife 
is called in the Mahabharata the daughter of Manu Arushi, 
the red one, the glowing fire-socket kindled by the fire-drill 3. 
In the Satapatha Brahmana she is called Su-konya, the 
daughter (kouyd) of Su, the mother-bird. Her father is 
Sharyata, the Manava or son of Manu, the god of the arrow 
(s/iarya), that is of the year-god Orion, who, as Krishanu the 
drawer of the bow, slew at the winter solstice the Shyena 
or frost {sjiya) bird, the year-mother-bird from whom the 
sun-god of Orion's year of the Palasha-tree was to be born. 
In short, Su-konya is a reproduction of the Shyena or bird- 
mother of Orion's year. 

Her marriage to Chyavana was the work of the Ashvins, 
the twin-stars Gemini, who made Chyavana, the aged kindler 
of the fires of Orion's year, young again by bathing him in 
the Pool of Regeneration, that is by causing him to be reborn 
from the living waters of the mother-ocean as the sun-god 
of the year they ruled. This is the pool symbolised in 
the story of the birth of the Lycian sun-god Apollo, born 
of Leto the tree-trunk by the yellow-river Xanthus, in which 
his mother bathed him at his birth. He thus became the 
sun-god of the race of the united North and South twins, 
the Kathi or Hittites, the Indian Yadava and Turvasu. It 
was on accomplishing this marriage of the rejuvenated sun- 



! 1 Samuel ix., x. 1— 13. : 1 Samuel ix. 24 ; Levit. vii. 32. 

3 Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, lxvi. p. 191. 



392 . History and Chronology 

father that the Ashvins were, according to the Satapatha 
Brahmana, allowed to drink Soma with the gods, and the 
Soma they drank was the honey-drink of which the mystery 
was taught them by Dadhiank, the god of the year of the 
horse's head r . 

At the sacrifice inaugurating the year of their reception 
the Bahish-pavamana stotra is recited. This is the chant 
of the outside (bakisk) drfezling or pure Soma, the heaven- 
sent rain. It is to this Soma Pavamana that all the hymns 
of the Ninth Mandala of the Rigveda are addressed, and 
he is called (ix. 107, 15) the god-king who with his waves 
takes the holy offerings across the sea. In other words, 
he is primarily the wind-god, driver of the clouds, who clears 
the air for the path of the sun-god. 

But the ritual gives us better insight into the inner 
meaning of this chant than we can gain from the interpre- 
tation of its title, for it was with this chant that the gods 
summoned the Ashvins 2 , and therefore it had a special 
historical significance. It consists of nine lines in the 
Gayatri eight%yllabled metre consecrated, as we have seen, 
to this year, and therefore of 72 syllables. That is to say, it 
is a year-hymn telling of the union in the year of the Gayatri 
eight-days week of the nine-days week of the cycle-year 
with the 72 five-day weeks of the Pleiades and Orion's year3. 

Thus we find in this ritualistic cryptogram, as well as 
in the kindling hymn, most striking proofs that the authors 
of this chanted ritual, written in the lilting Gayatri eight- 
syllabled metre, that employed by the earliest Vedic writers, 
used it, which has been reproduced in the Greek Anacreontic 
metre, as a memoria technica for the preservation of the 
memory of the epochs of the world's history ear-marked by 
the successive methods of reckoning annual time. 

But this is not all the historical information given by the 
ritual of the Bahishpavamana hymn, which summoned the 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. 1, 5, 1— 18; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 272 — 277. 

2 Ibid., iv. 1, 5, 13 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 275. 

3 Ibid., iv. 2, 5, 10; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 310, note I. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 393 

stars Gemini to the assembly of the gods who ruled time 
at the New Year's feast of the marriage of the rejuvenated 
year-father to the mother-year-bird. 

This hymn of invitation, which recognised the twin ruling- 
stars of the eleven-months year as the agents who introduced 
the new sun-year of the eight-days week, was recited at the 
Chatvala pit, whence the earth for the Uttaravedi or northern 
altar was taken. This is outside the limits of the consecrated 
Soma ground at its north-east corner, the rising point of the 
sun at the summer solstice r . The altar for which the earth 
was taken from the pit was the square* earth-altar of Varuna, 
which was, as we have seen, first covered with sheaves of 
Kusha grass, and afterwards, when used in the ritual of the 
animal sacrifices, with branches of the Plaksha-tree (feus 
infectorid). 

This latter covering was placed on the altar when the 
omentum and heart of the living victims slain were roasted 
at it, after they had been, slain outside the consecrated Soma 
ground close to the Chatvala pit. It was on this altar, 
reconsecrated for animal sacrifices by the Plaksha branches, 
that the triangle, made of Pitadaru wood (Pinus deodard), 
was substituted for the triangle made of Palasha twigs (Butea 
f rondos a) placed round the navel of this symbol of the divine 
mother of life. 

The Chatvala pit was especially associated with the 
ritual which looked on the year as a recurring series of 
ceremonial sacrifices marking its progress ; and it was into 
this pit that at the Samishtayajus ceremonies at the end 
of the annual Soma sacrifices there were thrown the throne 
(dsandi) of the Soma year - king, the Udumbari (Ficus 
glomeratd) supporting pillar of the house (sadas) of the 
year-gods, the Dronakalasa or hollowed tree-trunk in which 
the Soma sap of the year-tree was stored. These were 
afterwards transferred to the mother-water or temple-pool. 
Together with these the sacrificer threw into the pit his 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. 2, 5, 9, iii. 5, 1, 26; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 309, 
1 1 6, notes 1 and 3. 



394 History and Chronology 

year-girdle of three strands, signifying the three seasons of 
the year, and the black deer's horn he wore at the end of his 
sacrificial surplice as a reminiscence of the original year 
of the black antelope x . The ceremonies performed at the 
Chatvala recognised the beginning and end of a year opening 
with the rising of the sun at the summer solstice, that is the 
year of the Northern god of the rising, not the Southern god 
of the setting sun ; and this year was, as we have seen, that 
of three seasons and six-day weeks described in Chapter IV. 
Hence the New Year sacrifice which deified the Ashvins, 
the stars Gemini, who brought the sun-maiden or Pole Star 
bird as bride to the moon-god, and worshipped them as the 
twin door-posts of the House of God, included that year as 
well as the earlier years recalled in the Bahish-pavamana 
chant. In the ritual of the year's cups assigned to the 
ruling deities of the months of this new year the tenth cup 
was allotted to the Ashvins as the gods of the three-years 
cycle 2 . 

To bring the ritualistic historical record down to the 
Gayatrl year another chant of eleven verses was added to 
the Bahish-pavamana. The first of these stanzas is called 
Shiras, the head, and the second Grlvah, the neck, thus 
showing it to be a year-hymn of the eleven-months year 
of the horse's neck. This chant is called the head of the 
sacrifice offered by Dadhiank, the god of the horse's head, 
that is to say, it proclaimed the sacrifice to be one to the 
ruling-god of the eleven-months year 3, the year ruled by the 
Thigh constellation of the Great Bear. Hence this lengthy 
analysis of the ritual of this most significant marriage of the 
year-gods Chyavana and Su-konya, brought about by the 
Ashvins, shows that its initial ceremonies conveyed to the 
initiated a complete history of time records, as disclosed 

* Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. 4, 5, 2, iii. 2, I, 18 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 379, 
notes 2 and 3, 29, 30. 

2 Ibid., iv. I, 5, 16; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 278. 

3 Ibid., iv. 1, 5, 15, xiv. 1, 1, 18 — 24: S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 276, note I, 
xliv. pp. 444, 445. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 39$ 

by the various official years measured up to the close of the 
eleven-months year, including the year of the Pleiades Orion 
and the three-years cycle. 

The year that was now begun was that which forms the 
subject of this Chapter, and we shall see that in its history 
the opening month of the year was always that in which the 
sun was in Gemini. 

In addition to the history of the wedding of Chyavana and 
Su-konya given in the Brahmanas, there is another variant 
form in the Rigveda marriage - hymn telling of the union 
of Suria, the sun-maiden, born of the bird Su to the moon- 
god Soma, the rejuvenated Chyavana. In this poem the 
wedding oxen were slain in Magh (January — February), 
when, as we shall see, the year began, and the marriage 
was consummated in Aijuna or Phalgun (February — March) 
ending with the vernal equinox. That is to say, the 
ritualistic record of the year extends from about 10,200 B.C., 
when the sun entered Gemini in January — February, to 
8200 B.C., and after this to the time when the sun was in 
Gemini in February — March, about 6200 B.C. The Ash- 
vins brought the bride to this wedding in their three- 
wheeled car made of Palasha {Kimshuka, Butea frondosa) 
and Shalmali wood of the cotton-tree {Bombax Heptaph- 
yllci) r . After the wedding the bridegroom assumes his 
wife's clothes (v. 30), showing that it is a marriage of the 
sexless moon-god with the maiden of the central fire of 
heaven, the year-bird tending the fire of the never setting 
or dying Pole Star as the mistress of the House of God, 
the vault of heaven. She was the Vestal priestess of 
the navel-fire on the altar, that of Hercules Sandon and 
Omphale. The united pair who are to give birth to the 
sexless sun-god of this year, who was, as we have seen, Aurva, 
the son of the Thigh, are compared in the hymn to the 
months of the eleven-months year, the ten sons she is to 
bear to her sexless lord, and he himself as the eleventh 

1 Kg. x. 85, 8-20. 



396 History and Chronology 

(v. 45). These are the months symbolised by the seven 
stars of the Thigh and the four stars in Pegasus. 

We must now return to the story of Aurva, the offspring 
of this union, as told in the Mahabharata. In the Chaitra- 
ratha Parva neither his mother or father are named, but 
she is said to be one of the Bhrigus who were being ruthlessly 
slaughtered by the Kshatriyas just before the birth of her 
son. They were the savage conquerors of the age of the 
eleven-months year, which is further identified as that in 
which Aurva was conceived by the statement that the 
nascent god cast the fire of his wrath into the ocean, where 
it became the head of the sun-horse called Vadavamukha, he 
who speaks with the left (vama), that is with the distorted 
mouth of the Pole Star messenger whose circuits of the 
heavens are left-handed, the god of the year reckoned by 
methods different from those used by the ancestors of the 
indigenous dwellers on the land. 

It was at the birth of Aurva that his counterpart Para- 
shara, the overhanging cloud, son of Shaktri, the god Sakko, 
son of Vashishtha, who ruled the thirty-three gods of the 
eleven-months year, became the sun-god of day and per- 
formed the great sacrifice in which the gods of the stellar 
lunar era of Pole Star worship were destroyed, and his father 
Shaktri sent up to heaven as a star-god J . 

He then became, as we learn from the astronomy of the 
Manvantara, one of the stars of the Great Bear, called Ur-ja, 
born (j'a) of the Thigh [Urn), his full name being Urja- 
Stambha, the pillar (stambhd) of the thigh-born sun-god, the 
golden pillar Boaz of the Phoenician temples. This list of 
the fourteen star-parents, headed by Urja-Stambha, is a 
second edition of the first Manvantara or period of Manu, 
the astronomical reckoner. In this original list the first of 
the fourteen parent-stars marking the period of the creating 
lunar phases is the Svayambhara, the self-begotten 2 , the 



Mahabharata Adi {Chaitra-ratha) Parva, clxxx. — clxxxii. , pp. 512-519. 
Sachau, Alberum's India, vol. i. chaps, xliv. , xlv. pp. 387, 394. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 397 

Pole Star god, who was originally, as we have seen, Kepheus 
or Kapi, the ape-god who is worshipped by the Sabaeans 
as " the ancient light, the divinely self-created I ." 

This sun-god, born of the thigh of the Pole Star ape-god, 
is, in Greek mythology, Dionysos, son of Semele, the Phoe- 
nician goddess Pen-Samlath, the face (pen) of the Name 
(Shem) of God, the Samlah of Masrekah, the wine-land in 
the Edomite genealogy of Genesis xxxvi. 36, $7. His 
father was Zeus in his form of the ape-god of the mud (tan), 
the Cretan Tan, the Carthaginian and Phoenician Tanais 
or Tanit, the female, and therefore the earliest form of 
this male parent- god. She is called by Strabo the equi- 
valent of the Zend mother-goddess Anahita, the parent- 
cloud, the springs whence the Euphrates rose, the Zend 
form of the Vedic goddess Vrisha-kapl, the rain-ape, wife 
of Indra 2 . He was born prematurely, but was taken up by 
his father and sewn in his thigh, that is to say, he was 
first, as in the Hindu mythology of the Mahabharata, the son 
of the Thigh of the mother-ape, the stars of the Great Bear. 

When born he passed through two stages. First he was 
the sun-maiden, a girl brought up by Athamas, or Dumu-zi, 
Tammuz the star Orion, and Ino the mother of Melicertes, the 
Phoenician Melkarth, the sun-god-master of the city (KartJi) 3, 
the god Ar-chal or Herakles. When Athamas and Ino 
were made mad by Here, the goddess of stellar lunar 
time, the Greek form of the madness of Kalmashapada, the 
god of the eleven-months year of Chapter VI., this maiden- 
goddess was changed into the sun-ram of the ship Argo, 
and brought up by the nymphs of Nysa, who became the 
Hyades4,the companion stars to the Pleiades, the third in 
the list of the Hindu Nakshatra. That is to say, he was 



1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., p. 161. 

- Movers, Die Phonizicr, vol. i. pp. 617, 61S, Strabo, xi. p. 432 ; Rg. x. S6. 

3 It is to be noted that this Phoenician Karth, the Hebrew Kiriath, is the 
same word as the Celtic Caer, for city ; the name is therefore one pointing 
to the Celtic elements in the population of Semitic cities. 

4 Smith, Classical Dictionary, Dionysos, p. 226. 



398 History and Chronology 

in the second form of his birth the sun-goddess of the age 
of the supremacy of the- mother-goddesses, when Semele, 
the counterpart of Artemis, called Arktos, the goddess of 
the Great Bear, was ruler of heaven. He was the Dionysos 
Nuktelios, the night-sun, the Arcadian god of the lower 
world, the realm ruled by the Southern sun of the winter 
solstice, the god born when the sun was in the Hyades, that 
is in Taurus, in the midst of which they stand at the winter 
solstice, that is about 10,200 B.C., at the same time when the 
sun was in Gemini in January — February. 

It was at the winter solstice that he was worshipped in the 
festivals of the lesser Dionysos in Poseidon (December — 
January). These were held to celebrate the return of 
Dionysos from the lower world, whither he had gone to 
bring back the sun-mother Semele, and at Pellene his return 
was acclaimed by a feast of torches, like that offered to the 
Pleiades mother Demeter in October — November. This 
Dionysos festival was held in the grove of Artemis Soteira, 
the Great Bear goddess, the healing female physician 1 . 

At Megara this festival was held in the Akropolis conse- 
crated to Car, the Carian Zeus of the double axe, the two 
lunar crescents 2 . At these Dionysiac festivals held in 
Argolis on the Alcyonian lake, and at Cynethsea in Arcadia, 
a bull was sacrificed to him, and he was called on to rise 
up out of the lake as the bull sun-god of spring 3. 

It was to him as the spring-god that the festival of the 
Lenaea or wine-press was held in Gamelion (January — 
February), the month of the marriage (ydfio'i) of Here and 
Zeus, the beginning of this year. This Pausanias tells us 
was held at Migonium in Laconia, on a mountain called 
Larysium, sacred to Dionysos 4, and it, like the slaying of 
the Magh (January — February) wedding oxen in the Vedic 
marriage of Suria and Soma, was followed by the Anthesteria 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, vii. 27, I, vol. i. p. 371. 

2 Ibid., i. 40, 5, vol. i. p. 61, vol. ii. p. 525. 

3 Ibid., ii. 27, 6, viii. 19, 1, vol. i. pp. 130, 397, vol. iii. 302, 303. 

4 Ibid., iii. 22, 2, vol. i. p. 170. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 399 

of the 1 2th of Anthesterion (February — March), the Hindu 
Arjuna or Phalgun, when the marriage was consummated I . 

In another Greek story of the bull of Dionysos he is said 
to have been the son of Persephone, the Queen of the Pleiades, 
the star Aldebaran, when she was violated by Zeus. This 
is the exact reproduction of the Hindu story which tells 
of the birth of Vastos-pati, the lord (pati) of the house 
(vastos), the god of the household fire, from this star called 
RohinI, when she was violated by her father Prajapati Orion. 
This first form of Dionysos was called Zagreus, born as a 
hunter with a bull's head. This god, under the two names 
of Dionysos and Zagreus, was slain by the Titans, and was 
eaten by them as the totem bull man-god at the human 
and animal sacrifices of the rituals of the cycle-year 
and that of eleven months. His remains were buried under 
the Omphalos or navel of the tripod altar of the cycle-year 2 . 

This god born of the Thigh was the sun-god, the " child 
of the Majesty of Indra," born at the Ekashtaka or marriage 
day, the eighth day of the dark fortnight of Magh (January 
— February), which I have already described in Chapter VI. 
p. 332, at whose birth the left thigh was offered 3. 

He was also the Greek ploughing and sowing - god 
Triptolemus. He and his brother Zeus Eubouleus, Zeus 
of good counsel, are said by Pausanias to be traditionally 
the sons of Celeus or Cceleus, the hollow heaven, or of 
a brother of Celeus Dysaules. This latter name, as Mr. 
Frazer has shown, is properly Disaules, he who ploughs 

1 The Anthesteria or Festival of Recall {avaQtaaaaQai) was a three days New 
Year's Feast beginning with the Pitiioigia, when the souls of the dead issued from 
the sacred cleft called Pithoi or casks, the Indian Drona or hollowed tree-trunk 
of the mother-tree. They were greeted on the second day with Choai libations. 
It was a reproduction in a new year-reckoning of the Hindu New Year's Festival 
of the autumnal equinox, when the Pitaro Barishadah were called to sit on the 
Barhis or sheaves of Kusha grass. Harrison, Pandora's Box; Verrall, The Name 
Anthesteria, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xx. 1900, pp. 102 — no, 116. 

- Smith, Dictionary of Antiquities, vol. ii., Orphica, p. 302; Frazer, Pau- 
sanias, vol. iv, p. 143. 

3 Oldenberg, Grihya Sutra Pdraskara, Grihya Sutra, iii. 3, 5, 1 — 10 ; 
S.B.E., vol. xxix. pp. 342, 344. 



400 History and Chronology 

twice, a name 'like that of Trisaules, he who ploughs 
thrice *. 

In the Satapatha Brahmana we find a complete explana- 
tion of the assignment of this name to the year-god. In 
the ritual of the Rajasuya, the coronation rite of the Indian 
kings, the last of the ceremonies is the series of observances 
which begin with the oblation of the Dasapeya or ten cups 
offered to the gods of the year of the months of gestation, 
the year ending with the tenth cup, which, as we have seen 
on p. 394, was offered to the Ashvins. The second sacrifice 
of this series is that called the Panchabila, an offering pre- 
sented on a square platter with five divi- 
sions, as in this diagram. In the East or 
North-east division there is a cake on 
eight potsherds for Agni, the god of this W 
year of the eight-day weeks. In the 
South or South-east division a cake on 



Agni 



Mitra 
Varuna 

Brihaspati 



Vishva- . 
, , Indra 

devah 



eleven potsherds for Indra, the god of S 

the eleven-months year and eleven-days week. A bowl 
of rice gruel for the Vishvadevah is placed in the South- 
west division consecrated to the sun-bird, beginning the 
year with the setting sun of the winter solstice ; and a dish 
of curds, the curdled milk of the hot summer season, is 
placed in the Northern or North-west division sacred to 
Mitra Varuna, the twin-gods ruling the summer solstice 
when the rainy season (var) begins. In the central division 
is placed a bowl of rice gruel for Brihaspati, the Pole Star 
god, and with this is mixed part of the offerings to the other 
four year-gods. This centre-god is called " the white-backed 
bullock," the Pole Star ruling the path of Aryaman, the star 
Capella in the charioteer constellation Auriga, which, as we 
shall see, drove the year-car of the sun-god of this year 2 . 

These ceremonies close with the oblation of teams, the 
twelve cups offered to the twelve months of Orion's year at 
the ploughing festival. This took place among the Kuru- 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, i. 14, 2, ii. 14, 3, viii. 15, 4, vol. i. pp. 20, 91, 303, iii. p. 81. 

2 Eggeling, Sat, Brah., v. 5, 1, 1 — 12 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 120 — 123. 



of the Myth- Ma king Age. 40 1 

Panchalas, the Kurus or Kauravyas united with the Panchala 
men of the five (panch) days week. It was held in this year 
in the early spring - or dewy season, that is at the New Moon 
of Magh (January — February), when the dews which cease 
in the hot season are still plentiful. It was originally a 
festival of the winter solstice beginning at the New Moon 
of Push (December — January), when Pushan was wedded 
to the sun's daughter, but in the age of the birth of the 
Kauravyas and Pandavas, about 10,000 B.C., the year began 
when the sun was in the constellation Gemini, that is in 
January — February, and hence the annual ploughing begin- 
ning the year was transferred to that month. The plough 
was driven by the king, who is directed to plough a line 
forward or northward to represent the Northern course of the 
sun reaching its most northerly point at the summer solstice 
when the rains begin, and he is to return again southwards 
when he ploughs the second furrow, representing the sun 
returning again to the South at the end of six months x . In 
the ploughing of the Magh (January — February) year the 
first six-months furrow was that ending in July — August. 

Hence Triptolemus, the plougher of the two furrows, was 
originally the ploughing-god of the two seasons of the 
solstitial sun, who was also called, as the year-god of Orion's 
year of three seasons, Trisaules, or the god Qf three plough- 
ings. In this form he is represented in ancient Greek 
monuments as standing between Demeter, the barley-mother, 
originally representing the first six months of the year 
beginning in November or December, and Persephone, the 
six months beginning in May or June. When the year was 
divided into three seasons, each of four months or twenty- 
four five-day weeks, the centre season or summer, when the 
sun was in the North, was assigned to him. Hence he 
received from Demeter the gift of a car, the seven-starred 
northern chariot of the Great Bear, drawn by dragons, the 
stars of the constellation Draco 2 . This god of the dragon- 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Bruh., v. 5, 2, 1 — 5 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 123, 124. 
- Frazer, Pausanias, i. 14, 1, vol. i. p. 20, ii, p. 118, iv. p. 142. 

d d 



402 History and Chronology 

car, the thigh of the ape-god, taught Eumelus, the builder 
of the ploughing {ar) city of Aroe, to sow grain, and instructed 
Areas, the son of Kallisto the Great Bear mother, in the 
cultivation of corn, the baking of bread, the weaving of 
garments, and the spinning of wool x . 

It was as the sowing-god who sowed the furrow of heaven, 
the Indian goddess Sita, that Triptolemus became the 
Etruscan god Tages or Terie'gh, the wise child who was 
ploughed from the earth in the city of Tarchon (Tarquinii), 
who civilised the people of Etruria as he had civilised those 
of Arcadia. His Etruscan images represent him as a legless 
and armless god, with a lozenge-shaped body terminating 
in a point, and above this a second face is depicted, so that 
he has, like the sun-god, a Northern and Southern face. He 
wears on his breast the St. Andrew's Cross of the solstitial 
sun 2 . 

His counterpart, Zeus Eubuleus, was, like Triptolemus, 
a partner of Demeter and Persephone in a triad of pig-gods. 
A sow pregnant for the first time was offered to Demeter, 
an uncut boar to Persephone, and a sucking-pig to Eubuleus. 
Thus he was the son of the two year-mothers, the young 
boar-god, the sun of the winter solstice, as Triptolemus was 
the sun of summer. It was to these three pig-gods that pigs 
were thrown into the serpents' pit at the Thesmophoria 
festival beginning the Pleiades year 3. We find another 
phase of the history of the worship of the sun-god born of 
the Thigh in the story of Jacob. He came to the banks 
of the Jabbok, a tributary of the Jordan, after he left Harran 
or Kharran, the half-way city of the road (kharran) from 
the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, where the god was 
Laban, the white god " of the brick foundations of heaven," 
the god of the lunar-solar-gods of the year of the bee-hive 
palace of the three-years cycle. He had with him, as we 
are expressly told in Genesis xxxii. 22, his four wives : 
(1) Leah, the wild cow (le) with the tender eyes, the counter- 

1 Frazer, Pausanias, vii. 18, 2, viii. 4, 1, vol. i. pp. 354, 376. 

2 Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 96, 98. 

3 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. ii. pp. 118, 119, v. p. 29. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 403 

part of the three-eyed Samirus of Babylon and the Hindu 
Shiva, the mother of six sons and a daughter, the seven 
children of the Great Bear mother of the cow-born race ; 
(2) Rachel, the ewe, the mother of Joseph, or Asipu, the 
interpreter-god of the eleven-months year, who is to become 
the mother of the sun-ram ; (3) Billah, the old mother of 
Dan, the Pole Star god-mother of the Danava sons of Danu ; 
and (4) Zilpah, the foot of the snake (tszr), a form of Zillah 
or Tsir-lu, wife of Lamech or Lingal. She was the mother 
of the fish-sun-god Ashur, who was Assur, the supreme god 
of the Assyrians, the Hindu Ashadha ruling the summer 
solstice. Besides these four wives, the four seasons of the 
eleven-months year, he had with him these eleven months 
in the eleven children spoken of in this narrative of his 
contest with the god of the Thigh. 

Before crossing the Jabbok, he passed the night at Penuel, 
the place of the face {pen) of God, the female image of the 
mother-goddess, the Indian Pennu, the Great Bear, queen 
of Heaven of the Brythonic Celts. She appeared to him 
at night, and he wrestled with this goddess of the Thigh 
till the sun rose, and he found himself transformed into 
the sun-god, born from the left thigh of the Pole Star 
ape, who was conceived during the age when the priests 
who wore the sacrificial cord on the right shoulder bent 
the left knee to the moon-goddess ruling the year *, and 
not the right knee, bent when the sacrificial cord was worn 
on the left shoulder. Henceforth the sinew of his left thigh 
was dried up as the virtue had gone out of it, and the 
right thigh became the offering given to the priests of the 
sun-god of Benjamin, the son of the ewe-mother of the sun- 
ram, and the father or ancestor of Saul or Shawul, to whom 
the right thigh was given at his consecration festival 2 . It was 
after this transformation that Jacob met his brother Esau, 
the goat-god of the green pillar, and became his colleague as 



Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 4, 2, 1,2; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 361. 
Gen. xxxii. 22 — 32 ; Levit. vii. 32 ; 1 Samuel ix. 24. 

1) d 2 



404 History and Chronology 

the golden pillar of the sun-god. After this meeting 1 Jacob 
passed over Jordan and came to Succoth, the place of booths, 
where the tent-festival of Tabernacles inaugurating the New 
Year was held. 

His passing over Jordan is, as I have shown in Chapter V. 
pp. 229, 230, significant, for it tells us that he became the son, 
not of the Euphrates, the Nahr or channel-river of the Pole 
Star, but of the yellow (yareh) moon-river, the river-mother 
of Omphale, daughter of Iardanus 2 , the navel-fire of the altar 
and the goddess of the phallic worship of the sexless god 
Herakles Sandon who wore her clothes. Her father was 
the river looked on as the national parent-stream of the 
Phoenician Minyans, the archers of Kudon in the west of 
Crete, who were most noted bowmen, the picked archers 
of the Kushika sons of the bow and the antelope. They 
were the sons of Teucer, son of the mountain and sheep- 
mother Ida, whose daughter became wife to Dardanus, who 
was, as we have seen, the antelope sun-god of Troy, and 
it was Teucer who brought the worship of Apollo-Smintheus, 
the mouse-god, from Crete to Troy 3. These sons of Iar- 
danus were, according to Pausanias vi. 21, 5, sons of the 
Idaean Herakles of the Dactyli or priests of the five-days 
week, and their goddess-mother was the Cydonian Athene, 
that is of the original tree-mother whose history has been 
traced in previous chapters 4. They took the name of their 
sacred river to Elis in Greece, where it was an ancient name 
of the river on which Phaea, called after the sow Phaea, 
destroyed by Theseus, stood. Its name meant the shining- 
moon-city, and it was taken by Nestor 5. The river Iardanus 
was, in the time of Pausanias, called the Acidas 6 . It was as 
the son of this moon-river that Jacob became god of the 
eleven-months year while he dwelt in Shechem, the then 

1 Genesis xxxiii. 17. 2 Herod, i. 7. 

3 Homer, Od., iii. 292; Hor., Carm. iv. 9, 17 ; Smith, Classical Dictionary, 
Cydonia, p. 200, Teucer, p. 754. 

4 Frazer, Pausanias, vi. 21, 5, vol. i. p. 317. 

5 Homer, Iliad, vii. 135 ; Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 1, 3, vol. i. p. 70. 
£ Frazer, Pausanias, v. 5, 5, vol. i. p. 243. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 405 

capital of the lands of Ephraim, the men of the two ashes 
(eplira), the united Northern and Sonthern races, sons of 
Joseph. It was at Shechem that the Hivite villagers, the 
Rephaim first settlers in the land, were circumcised. This 
ceremony was apparently a variant form of the circumcision 
of the united races performed by Hoshea, the leader of the 
Ephraimites, sons of Joseph, when he joined Caleb, the dog- 
star, in robbing the treasury of the bees, and established the 
eleven-months year. 

Prom Shechem Jacob went to Luz, the place of the almond 
(luz) tree, the nut-tree of the Toda sons of the bull, and 
parent-tree of the Kohathite priests, and also, as we shall see, 
of the sun-god of this year. At Luz, which he called Bethel, 
the place of the pillar of God, Jacob buried the idols of the 
night-gods of his former worship. From thence he passed 
on to Bethlehem, where the sun-god of this year, Benjamin, 
the god of the right hand, was born simultaneously with the 
death of his mother, Rachel, the ewe-mother of Joseph, 
the god of the eleven-months year, who wore the star coat 
of many colours J . 

The son of the right hand was born as the sun-god of the 
worshippers of the Pole Star of the North, now represented 
by the Sabaean Mandaites, who in worshipping the Pole Star 
turn their faces to the North, and who have thus the rising 
sun of the East on their right hand and not on their left, like 
the Harranites, who face southwards while worshipping 2 . 
This is the position of the Roman augurs, whose parent-god 
was the mother-tree of the South. The Sabaean Mandaites 
in their annual service inaugurating their year, fix the hour 
by referring to the position of the Great Bear and the Pole 
Star, and mark their connection with the age of the sex- 
less gods by substituting a wether for the earlier ram offered 
on New Year's Day 3. 

1 Genesis xxxiii. 16 — xxxv., xxxvii. 3, 4. 

- Sachau, Alberum's Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap, xix., Festivals 
of the Moslems, p. 329. 

3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, Sabaean New Year's Ritual, 
vol. ii. , Essay viii., pp. 159 — 164. 



406 History and Chronology 

The birth-place of the sun-god, son of the right hand, was 
Bethlehem, also called Ephrata, the place of the ashes or 
shrine of the dead faiths of the past. It was, as I have 
shown in Chapter IV. p. 154, the house of Lehem, the Ak- 
kadian twin gods Lakhmu and Lakhamu, the offspring 
of Lakh, the Akkadian form of the Median and Hindu Ragh 
the sun-god. It was there, according to St. Jerome, Ep. 19, 
that the annual festival of the death and rebirth of Tammuz 
or Dumu-zi, the year-god Orion, was held. 

It was at this ancient shrine of Boaz, the golden pillar, that 
the new sun-god, rising on the right hand in the East, was 
born as the son of the left thigh, and he who was first Saul 
or Shawul, the heirless sun-god of the tribe of Benjamin, 
who had lost the asses that used to draw his father's car, 
was succeeded by David or Dodo the Beloved, who is named 
as the national god on the Moabite stone, who was the 
eighth son of Jesse or Ishai, meaning He who is. He is 
the eighth son of the Thigh, but of the right not the left 
thigh, the god born not of the sexless gods of the lunar 
era of the bisexual parent fig-tree, but of the male and 
female pair, the two trees of the mother Tamar, the date- 
palm-tree which only bears fruit when the flower of the 
female-tree has been fertilised by the pollen of the flower 
of the male tree. As parent of the son of the Thigh, Ishai 
is also called Nahash, the plough-snake (nakur), the god of 
the constellation of the Great Bear, the Arabic Nagash, 
the Indian Nahusha, the Gond Nagur. As Nahush he is the 
father of Zeruiah the Cleft, the goddess Tirhatha and Abigail, 
she whose father (ab) is Exaltation, the daughter of the 
inspired prophet of the gnomon-stone I . He is also called 
Dodo of Bethlehem, father of El Hanan the merciful, which 
is, as we have seen on p. 380, the name of David in the 
Edomite genealogy of Genesis xxxvi., so that Dodo the 
son of the Thigh was son of himself, the self-begotten- 
god 2 . It was this El Hanan who slew Goliath, son of 

1 1 Chron. ii. 16, 17 ; 2 Sam. xvii. 25. ~ 1 Chron. xi. 26 ; 2 Sam. xxiii. 24. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 407 

Rapha, the giant god of the Rephaim, and his brother 
Lahmi, a form of Lakhmu, to whom Beth - Lehem was 
dedicated J . He slew them with five stones out of the 
brook, their parent river-god, the five days of their week, 
the last of their rule as year-gods 2 . 

The sun-god who drew his strength from the left thigh, 
whence he was born, was, as we have seen, the god of the 
ten and eleven-months year, and it was at the close of this 
epoch, when his power as the ruling sun-god was departing, 
that his left thigh was broken or withered like that of Jacob 
in the contest at Penuel. This is what happened to the 
Celtic sun-god Cuchulainn, the hound of Cu, before he was 
slain by Lugaid, and the story of his end reproduces in 
a most striking form the history of the supersession of the 
god of the eleven-months year by the god of the year of 
eight-day weeks. Lugaid, his slayer, was the son of Fergus 
Fairge, that is Fergus the Ocean-god of the Southern waste 
of waters. It was into the lap of Fergus that the brooch 
with which Maine used to fasten her cloak fell, and Maine 
was, as we shall see presently, the goddess of the eight-days 
week of the eight Maine, the links of the chain that bound 
together this year of fifteen months 3. Lugaid is also called 
the son of the three Curoi hounds, said to be Cu-chulainn, 
Conall Cernach, slayer of Lugaid and Curoi, keeper of the 
cows of light, husband of Blathnat the flower-goddess, the 
Celtic form of the Greek Koronis, mother of yEsculapius the 
sun physician 4. These Curoi were also the Corr or Cranes 
whence Lugaid got his name of Corr the Crane. They 
were the three Cranes of Mider, the god of the lower world, 
of the Southern sun of winter, the three baleful birds answer- 
ing to the Greek Harpies or vultures, who tried, in the story 
of Jason, to kill Phineus the sea-eagle, by taking away his 
food, and pecking him when he tried to eat. These birds 



1 I Chron. xx. 5 ; 2 Samuel xxi. 19. - 1 Samuel xvii. 23 ff. 

3 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. p. 328. 

4 Ibid., Lect. v. p. 472, note 1 — 474, 552, 676. 



4-08 History and Chronology 

were driven by Zetes and Kalais, sons of Boreas, the North- 
east and North-west winds in the Strophades, or turning 
islands, marking the winter turning-points of the solstitial 
sun, and became the three weaving sisters in the constellation 
of the Vulture T . It was these three Cranes in the form of 
three old women blind of the left eye, the one-eyed Graise 
whose eye Perseus carried off, who met Cuchulainn on his 
way to fight Lugaid, and persuaded him to eat the shoulder- 
blade of the hound, whence he took his name, the year-dog 
Argus, the constellation Argo. They gave it to him with 
the left hand, and it was from his left hand that Cuchulainn 
ate it, and he put the bone under his left thigh. Thereupon 
the strength of his left thigh departed, and he was slain by 
Lugaid 2 . That is to say, the sun-god of the left thigh was 
slain by the son of the three Cranes of the South land of 
Fergus Fairge, who gave to Lugaid the brooch of the eight- 
days week of Maine, and Lugaid, god of the winter solstice, 
was in his turn slain by Conall, god of the summer solstice, 
whose horse, the dog-star Sirius, had a dog's head 3. 



B. The story of Tobit and Jack the Giant Killer y builder 
of the altar of the eight and nine-day weeks. 

The sun-god born of the Thigh appears again in the story 
of Tobit and his son Tobias, who was married by Raphael, 
one of the seven angels of God, the seven stars of the Great 
Bear 4, to Sara, who had had seven husbands who all died 
on their wedding-day. She was the daughter of Raguel, the 
god {el) Raghu of the Median land of Rages or Ragha, 
the birth-place of the Zend sun-god worshipped by the 
Akkadians and in Bethlehem as Lakh. But before dealing 
with the facts of this story as told in the Apocrypha, I must 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. iv. pp. 331 — 334, 676, 677; Hewitt, 
Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii. , pp. 198, 199. 

2 Hull, The Cuchullin Saga, Cuchulainn's Death, pp. 254 — 263. 

3 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. v. p. 472. 

4 Tobit, chapter xii. 15. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 409 

first show by comparing some of its numerous variants the 
fundamental features of this historical narrative. In a 
number of these collected by Mr. Groome, the agent of 
the final marriage with which the story ends is a dead man, 
who is one of the previous husbands of the sun-mother the 
bride, and who has been buried by the future father of 
the sun-god, who is in Tobit the eighth husband of the 
bride. The dead and buried husband rises from the dead 
to aid his benefactor, and in the Russian story he descends 
from heaven as the angel of God. In all except one of Jack 
the Giant Killer, which I will discuss after I compare the 
other variants with the Tobit tale, the girl whom the suc- 
cessful wooer is to marry has had several husbands who 
died or were either strangled or beheaded by her on their 
wedding night. There are five husbands in the Armenian 
story, six in the Russian, and nine in the German version. 
In the Gypsey and Armenian two dragons and two serpents 
come out of the mouth of the bride on her wedding night, 
and in the Russian story one dragon flies into the bridal- 
chamber to kill the husband, and one comes out of the inside 
of the bride after she had been sawn in half, and these are 
slain by the assistant angel. In the German version the 
saviour of the dead man is supplied by him with a feather 
shirt, a rod and a sword, and with these he flies after the 
princess as she, in the guise of the year-bird, makes her way 
at night through the air to her demon lover of the Pole Star 
Age. He is thus enabled to answer the three questions 
as to what she was thinking of which she asks him to answer 
at his successive daily visits. In the last answer he tells her 
she is thinking of her lover's head, the head of the god 
of the dead-year, which he produces. In the Gypsey and 
Armenian story the guardian-angel claims half the bride, 
a reminiscence of the two seasons making the one year, but 
gives up his claim when the second evil beast, the second 
season, comes out of her. In the Russian version she is 
sawn in half by the assistant who restores her to life as the 
mother of the sun-god of the regenerated year, when the 



410 History and Chronology 

dragons leave her. In the German version the bride changes 
on the wedding night, when dipped in water by the bride- 
groom, first into a raven, then into a dove, and last into 
a maiden. These changes mark previous epochs of the life 
of the year-mother-bird, and we have in all these stones 
of the resurrection of the slain man, the dead sun returned 
to life as the Time-spirit or German Zeit-geist, who destroys 
the evil spirits which in previous ages deformed the year- 
mother who slew in her successive changes her husbands. 
And the Time-spirit finally transforms the changing reckoner 
of the year by wedding her to the sun-god l . 

When we turn from these variant versions to the story 
of Tobit in the Apocrypha, we find that the burier of the 
strangled man who was, as we shall see presently, one of the 
husbands of the bride, is Tobit himself, who became blind 
the night he buried him. On that night Anna his wife got 
a kid as wages, and was told by Tobit that she stole it, 
on which she reproached him for his hypocrisy. On this 
same night Sara, the daughter of Raguel, prayed that she 
might be provided with a husband whom Asmodeus would 
not strangle 2 . 

Tobit, the blind-god, husband of Anna, dwelt in Nineveh, 
the town of the fish-mother-goddess Nana, for the cuneiform 
ideogram of its name means the city of the fish, and the 
name for fish, Kha, also means the oracle, the teaching-fish. 
Hence it was the city of the fish-god first called la. He 
is called by Berdsus Oannes, which is a form, as Lenormant 
has shown, of la Khan, la the fish 3 who became the god 
Assur, the supreme god of Nineveh. Tobit was thus the 
blind oracle of the fish-mother-goddess, the gnomon-stone. 
He was uncle to Achiacharus, son of Ana-el, the god Anu, 
who was cup-bearer to the king, that is the filler of the cups 



1 F. H. Groome, 'Tobit and Jack the Giant Killer,' Folklore, vol. ix., 1S98* 
pp. 226 ff. - Tobit i. 17 — 19, ii. 3 — 14. 

3 Sayce, Assyrian Grammar: Syllabary, 178,442; Lenormant, Chaldaau 
Magic and Sorcery, chap. xiii. App. I. p. 203. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 41 1 

of the seasons 1 . Hence he, Anna and Achiacharus formed 
a triad like that of Ilos, Assarakos and Ganymede, that 
is of Ilos, the father-river or eel-god of the Trojan fig-tree. 
Assarakos, the god of the bed, and Ganymede, the cup- 
bearer of the gods, and the offspring of this triad born 
in the year-bed of the mother-tree described in Chapter IV. 
pp. 143, 144, was Tobit, the Jewish Asherah or gnomon-tree 
pillar, the double of Dhritarashtra, the blind gnomon-stone 
husband of Gandhari, the Pole Star Vega. Anna and Anael, 
father of Achiacharus, are the bisexual female and male 
form of the goddess Anna Perennis of Roman ritual, and the 
goddess of Carthage, sister of Dido or Dodo the beloved 
sun-goddess. 

Tobit belongs to the tribe of Naphtali, the son of Billah, 
the old mother of Dan, the Pole Star god, who sacrificed 
to the heifer Baal, that is to the mother-cow Rohinl Alde- 
baran, and not to the moon-bull. He alone of his tribesmen 
went up to Jerusalem to pray, and he was the grandson 
of Deborah, the bee-prophetess, and therefore a father-god 
of the age of the three-years cycle, the beehive and tower 
of God 2 . It was also to this age that Sara belonged as 
the daughter of the sun-god Raghu, the father of Rama, 
who ploughed with the seven stars of the Great Bear, her 
husbands. She was the cloud-goddess Shar, also called 
I-shara, the house (/) of Shar, the mother of corn, that 
is to say, she was the husk-mother of the seed-grain which 
she, as in the Siamese Cinderella story, fostered and fed. 
She was the guardian-encloser of the sun-god who was 
to be born from her as the sun of the corn, the seed of life. 
Isaac, the laughing-grain born from the ninety-year old 
withered husk-mother Sara, wife of Abram, the father Ram 
son of Raghu and brother of Sara. Thus Tobit was the 
blind tree-trunk) and Sara his wife the mother of the grain- 
born sun-god. They were both to be rejuvenated, like 
Chyavana, by the leading angel-star of the Great Bear, 

1 Tobit 1. 21, 22. -' Ibid. i. 5, 6, 8. 



412 History and Chronology 

Raphael, the god of the giants (rapha), and both were gods 
of the Southern faiths which looked to the mother-heifer- star 
Aldebaran as the parent of life and not to the Northern 
moon-father. 

The regeneration of Tobit and Sara as parents of the god 
of the right Thigh was to be accomplished by Raphael, the 
leading star of the Thigh constellation, who had been buried 
with the dead gods of the age of Pole Star rule of the left 
Thigh, when fathers offered their eldest sons, the slain 
Raphael in sacrifice l . Raphael, eight years after Tobit 
became blind, that is at the end of the year-week of eight 
days 2 , led Tobias, the rejuvenated Tobit, the young sun-god 
born of the old gnomon pillar, to the Northern land of Raghu, 
the birth-place of the sun-god of day. On their way they 
caught in the Tigris, the river of the sun-god going South, 
the Zend Rangha, a fish which tried to devour Tobias, that 
is the river-fish or alligator constellation Draco. Raphael 
took from it its heart, liver and gall 3, the seats of the vital 
essence in primitive physiology. From the heart and liver, 
when burnt by Tobias at Raphael's command, rose the fumes 
which drove away to the South, his home, the evil spirit 
Asmodeus4, who, as the god of the offerers of human sacri- 
fices representing the dead sun-god of the past year, was the 
god who killed the former husband of Sara, and of the brides 
of the variant tales. 

He was the god Ashma-deva, the god of the stone-gnomon- 
pillar [ashman), the Greek Akmdn, the anvil of the heavenly 
smith, the thunder-god of the South, whose year began when 
the sun was in the South at the winter solstice. Fourteen 
days after the consummation of the marriage and the regene- 
ration of Sara as the sun-mother, they returned at the 
summer solstice, after the defeat of the winter-god of the 
South, to Nineveh. It was then that Tobias, instructed by 
Raphael, restored to Tobit his eyesight by rubbing his eyes 
with the fish gall, and made him once more the seeing Pole 

1 Tobit v. 13. 2 Ibid. xiv. 2. 3 Ibid. vi. I — 5. 4 Ibid. viii. 3. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 413 

Star god of the age of Orion's year. Tobit, before his 
approaching death, foretold the erection of a new temple 
of the sun-god of day, the vault of heaven consecrated, as 
we shall see, to the fully regenerated Buddha to replace the 
beehive palace of the gods of night I . 

The age of this history is made capable of identification 
by the gift of the kid to Anna. This was the constellation 
Auriga, that of the two kids on the wrist of the driver of 
this year-car, which was to replace the plough and waggon 
constellation of the Great Bear. This, as I have shown in 
Chapter VI. pp. 338 — 340, was the constellation ruling the year 
of the zodiacal sun in the Babylonian astronomy. The chief 
star in this constellation a Aurigae is the star Aryaman 01 
Hindu and Zend astronomy, which is, as we shall see, the 
star of the sun-physician. I have now before completing 
the review of the historical teaching of the story of Tobit 
to examine the variant form of Jack the Giant Killer. In 
identifying him we must remember the nursery rhyme of the 
House that Jack built, which we shall see was an ancient 
historical tale. We have seen that the original Akkadian 
teaching-fish was Iakhan, who became the Oannes of Berosus, 
the Greek Iohannes, our John, who has also resumed his 
original Akkadian name of Ia-kh or Jack. He, on St. John's 
Day, the 24th of June, still rules the summer solstice. The 
House that Jack built is depicted for us in the Talmud form 
of our nursery rhyme. It is founded on the " kid which my 
father bought for two pieces of money." This takes the 
place of " the Rat which ate the Malt " in our version. 

Considering the number of the actors in this primitive 
relic of folklore, there being in the Talmud version ten and 
in ours nine actors, and the certainty that it can be traced 
to the god Iakhan, the fish, who, as we have seen, taught 
the early Akkadians the astronomy of the first stellar year 
measured by weeks, there is a very strong probability that 
the actors in this old rhyme represent the bricks or days 

1 Tobit viii. 19, xi. 4 — 13, xiv. 5. 



414 History and Chronology 

forming the weeks which built up this year edifice. This 
was the beehive palace of the gods of time, beginning with 
the Laban "brick foundation of heaven," and the names 
of the bricks forming its foundation-week were probably, 
according to the custom of stellar worship, stars connected 
with the course of the year, and possibly with the zodiacal 
stations of the moon and sun. 

In Chinese astronomy, one of the oldest in the world, 
there are two Zodiacs in which the signs are the same, but 
the first denotes the hours of the day beginning at midnight, 
and the second the zodiacal path of the sun. But the great 
antiquity of this representation of the sun's yearly course 
is shown by the fact that the signs are retrograde and mark 
the course of the sun going from right to left, according 
to the rule of the Pole Star Age, and not from left to right 
as in the solar era. The first of these signs is the Rat, which 
represents in the annual zodiac Aquarius ; and the second, 
the ox, is not Pisces, but Capricornus, so that the first sign 
represents the last month of the year. The signs are : 1. The 
Rat, 2. The Ox, 3. The Tiger, 4. The Hare, 5. The Dragon 
or Crocodile, 6. The Serpent, 7. The Horse, 8. The Ram, 

9. The Ape, 10. The Cock, 11. The Hog, 12. The Fox 1 . 
Among the Mongols the signs are: 1. Mouse, 2. Ox, 3. Leopard, 
4. Hare, 5. Crocodile, 6. Serpent, 7. Horse, 8. Sheep, 9. Ape, 

10. Hen, 11. Dog, 12. Hog, so that with the exceptions of 
signs 1, 11, and 12, they are the same as the Chinese 3 . 
These signs only concern the present discussion in the first 
sign or brick of the year-house. This is the Rat or Mouse, 
the Rat that ate the Malt that lay in the house built by 
Jack. The Rat in Chinese represents Aquarius, and is used 
as a sign for water. The Babylonian zodiacal year of the 
ten kings of Babylon ended with Xisuthros, the star Skat 8 

1 Burton, Arabian Nights, vol. xi. p. 219, note 1. The list in the article 
Zodiac, Encyc. Brit.. Ninth Edition, vol. xxiv. p. 793, substitutes Dog and 
Pig for the nth and 12th signs. 

2 Prescott, History of Mexico, vol. iii., Appendix, Part i, , Origin of Mexican 
Civilisation, p. 521, note. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 415 

Aquarius. He was, according to Ber5sus, the god saved 
from the Flood, who in the Akkadian form of the Flood 
Legend was Dumu-zi {Orion), called Dumu-zi of the Flood, 
and it was he who rose again as the sun of the New Year 
measured by the ten zodiacal stars, when he entered the 
constellation Aries in the star Hamal, represented by Alorus, 
the first of these kings. Thence he passed through eight 
stars in Taurus, Gemini, Leo, Virgo, Scorpio, and Capricornus, 
to return by the path of our zodiacal sun to Skat in Aquarius. 
This Babylonian zodiac represented, as I have shown 
elsewhere, a celestial circle of 360 degrees divided into 
minutes and seconds. The 432,000 years of the kings or 
seconds of the circle were the 432,000 years of the Hindu 
Kali Yuga on which their chronology is based. Hence 
these two coincident systems of year reckoning mark an 
important period in the history of the two countries r . As 
the year in which this zodiac became the official measure 
of time is said by the Babylonian historians to have been 
that in which the traditional flood occurred, and as it began 
with the Babylonian rainy season, it is most probable that 
their Hebrew successors, who took their materials from 
Babylonish sources, took thence the date of this flood-year, 
which they made to begin on the 17th of Marchesvan 
(October — November), when the sun was in Aquarius ; it 
would thus be in Aries in December — January ; and this 
zodiacal position marks the date of this year as about 
8,200 B.C., and fixes this as the time when this zodiac was 
first used as the almanac of the official year, and this was 
the date when the sun was in Gemini in February — March, 
that beginning the year of which the history is told in this 
Chapter ; or if we take Aries, according the Babylonian 
Zodiac, as the sign following Aquarius and representing 
November — December, the year will begin with the sun in 

1 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Remarks on the Tablet of the Thirty Stars.' 
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeology, January, 1890 ; Sayce, Hibbevt 
Lectures for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 233 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, 
vol. i. , Essay iv., pp. 382 — 384; Gen. vi. 6. 



41 6 History and Chronology 

Aries in November — December, and in Gemini in January— - 
February, or about 10,200 B.C. This latter date is that of 
the year of Dionysos Nuktelios, as shown in p. 398. 

Hence we see that in ancient tradition the Water-rat was 
the founder of the zodiacal year based on the worship of the 
rain-god, the rain and cloud bird Khu, who brought good 
crops. This Water-rat became in the evolution of theo- 
logical astronomy the Mouse-god Apollo Smintheus, the 
god of the primaeval Semites, whose worship was, as we have 
seen, brought by Teucer, the archer-god, from Crete to 
Troy. Having thus shown the coincidence between the 
Chinese and Mongol zodiacal signs of the Rat and Mouse, 
their correspondence with the primitive Babylonian zodiac, 
and their probable reproduction in the Rat of the House 
that Jack built, I will now proceed to compare the English 
and Talmud bricks of this house. They are as follows : 
English — 1. Rat, 2. Cat, 3. Dog, 4. Cow, 5. Maiden, 6. Man, 
7. Priest, 8. Cock, 9. Farmer. Talmud — 1. Kid, 2. Cab 
3. Dog, 4. Staff, 5. Fire, 6. Water, 7. Ox, 8. Butcher, 9. Angel 
of Death. It would require a special treatise to show the 
full meaning of each of these signs, and I certainly could not 
write it with my present knowledge, but I will remark that 
the last two signs, the Sowing Farmer and the Angel of 
Death, corroborate the belief that it is an old nursery poem 
made to teach children the history of time, beginning its 
first annual revolutions with the death of the old year and 
the sowing of seed in the Pleiades month of the Southern 
spring, October — November. Also the secpnd sign, the Cat, 
is significant. She is the cat that drew the year-car of 
Freya, the sun-hawk, and the Egyptian cat-goddess Bast, 
mother of the mummied cats, who bears on her head horns 
and the moon-disk with the serpent under it. This shows 
that the cat-goddess of the second day is a moon-goddess. 
Her other name is Sochit, under which she is depicted as 
a scorpion with horns and disk. This is the scorpion banner- 
sign of Dan, the Hebrew son of Danu or Billah, the Pole 
Star goddess. This scorpion is called in Genesis xlix. 17 



of the My tli-Making Age. 417 

a serpent. This banner guarded the Israelite camp of the 
North, containing the tribes of Dan, Asher, and Naphtali r . 
The name Sochit of this scorpion or serpent-goddess is 
connected with the Coptic Sochi, a field, and means in the 
record of a grant of land at Edfu an area both of high and 
low land, that is, a village area, so that she is a village- 
goddess ; and as a star she is symbolised by Antares a 
Scorpio, the star of the month Tisri (September — October), 
and also by 7 Draconis, so that her worship goes back to the 
days of lunar-solar worship of the age of the cycle-year and 
its equinoxes 2 . 

If this list represented the primaeval conception of the 
bricks that make the house of time it must symbolize the 
week, and as the year of the beehive house of heaven 
was that of the cycle-year, the number nine is that of the 
nine days of the week of this year measured by the lunar 
crescents, the horns of the cat-goddess. But the Talmudic 
interpretation of this ancient school poem, which in their 
version contains ten verses, of which the last tells of the 
final victory of the sun-god born from the ten months of 
gestation, throws still further light upon the history it 
accords. In these ten verses, when compared with the 
English version, we see that, in the original school lesson, 
the butcher of the eighth verse of the Talmud variant was 
the sun-cock. The substitution of the butcher for the cock is 
explained by the Talmud commentators to mean the vic- 
tory gained by the men of Israel, sons of Edom, over the 
armies of Gog and Magog, Kush and Pul, that is the con- 
quering progress of the victorious king of Edom, Baal 
Hanan or David, the eighth son of the Thigh, the sun-god 
of this epoch 3. Also the nine bricks when accumulated 
in weeks made up the ten lunar months of gestation from 

1 Number ii. 25 — 31. 

2 Brugsch, Religion mid MytJiologie der Alten ALgypter, pp. 333, 649 ; 
Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap. xxix. pp. 289, 290, xxxii. p. 329. 

3 Paterson Smith, The Old Documents and the New Bible, The Talmud and 
the Targums, viii. ; The Hojtse that Jack Built, pp. 141 — 144. 

E e 



41 8 History and Chronology 

which the barley - sun was born, to become the malt that 
lay in the house that Jack built, and the ninth of these in 
the Talmud version is the Angel of Death, the day of the 
decease of the conquering sun who has butchered his 
enemies, and who dies when he has done his work to 
rise again as the sun of the age of solar worship I . 

This interpretation of the connection between the Tal- 
mud version of the poem originally describing the year of 
nine - day weeks and ten lunar months of gestation, and 
this year of eight-day weeks, is confirmed by the substitu- 
tion of the kid for the rat as the first brick. 

This kid and that given to Anna in the story of Tobit 
is the constellation of Auriga, the charioteer with two kids 
upon his wrists, called by the Akkadians Askur the goat. 
This is the constellation which ruled the year in Babylon 
when that of the Great Bear pointing to the Pole Star 
was discarded as an indicator of time. It was believed to 
watch over the course of the sun through the zodiacal 
stars 2 , and mark the star constellation into which the sun 
entered when the year begun. This was in the final Baby- 
lonian year the constellation Taurus, in which the sun was 
at the vernal equinox, about 4200 B.C., but its functions 
began long before that epoch. In this constellation the 
chief star a Auriga was Capella, the little goat, which re- 
placed the old Pole Star goat as the warder of time. It 
is called in the Rigveda and Zendavesta Aryaman and 
Airyaman, the ploughing constellation, the Celtic Airem, 
the ploughman. This star-god is called in the Zendavesta 
the great healer of diseases who drives away the pestilences 

1 See Appendix B, where the English and Talmud versions of The House 
that Jack Built are given in full as well as the Basque version. This, as 
I there point out, throws much fresh light on the origin of this primaeval 
nursery lesson, and conclusively proves that in one of its earliest, if not its 
earliest, forms it dates from the age of the cycle-year ruled by the Pole Star 
goat. 

* The god Uz, the goat, is depicted on Babylonian monuments as sitting 
on a throne watching the revolution of the solar disk. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures 
for 1887, Lect. iv. p. 285. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 4 1 9 

brought by Angra Mainyu, the Southern god of the Pole Star 
era of the worship of the Southern sun, the god summoned 
by Nairyo-Sangha, the perpetual fire burning on the altar 
of the sun-god. In the Rigveda he is one of the six 
Aditya belonging to the father triad of Mitra, Varuna, 
Aryaman I . 

This star as the star of the sun-physician is intimately 
connected with the stars Gemini, the Ashvins, who were 
in Hindu mythology the physicians of the gods who reju- 
venated and married Chyavana. It was these stars which 
Aryaman Capella was employed especially to watch as those 
of the Gate of God through which the sun entered the year. 
This was the triumphal entry of the sun-god at his marriage 
in Greece with Here, the moon, in the month Gamelion 
(January — February), and that of the Vedic marriage of 
Soma, the male moon-god, and Chyavana with Su-konya, 
the sun-maiden, in the same month. This was the Hindu 
Magh (January — February), and the sun was in the constel- 
lation or car of the Ashvins in this month, about 10,200 B.C. 
This was the date when the Babylonian zodiacal year of the 
ten kings began, when the sun was in Aries in November — 
December. It was also the date of the first year of the Thigh, 
the conquering year of the eight-days week, the year of the 
contest which ended with the final victory of the sun-god 
and the consummation of the marriage of Su-konya or Suria 
and Soma, which took place in Arjuna of Phalgun (February 
— March), the month assigned to it in the Rigveda. That 
is to say the astronomical war between the two rival systems 
of lunar-solar Pole Star worship and that of the independent 
sun-god lasted till the sun was in Gemini in February — 
March, about 8200 B.C., that is, it occupied the whole period 
when Vega was the Pole Star from about 10,000 to 8000 
B.C., and ceased with the final victory of the zodiacal sun- 

1 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendidad Fargard, xxii. pp. 229, 235 ; Rg. vii. 
66, 3, 4; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 
416 — 422, where the question as to the stellar position of Aryaman is fully 
discussed. 

E e 2 



420 History and Chronology 

god when the Pole Star entered Hercules, the sun constella- 
tion, about 8000 B.C. 

We have now to complete the review of this phase of 
history, as told in the various forms of the Tobit story, to 
return to that telling of the exploits of Jack the Giant-killer, 
the builder of Jack's house. He, as we have seen, first built the 
house of the year of the nine-day weeks, and after that, in the 
Talmud story, the house of the eight-day weeks of the present 
year. In his wars against the giants of the eleven-months 
year he met with the son of Arthur, the Celtic ploughing- 
god Echaid Airem, the ploughman or farmer who sowed 
the seed whence the malt seed of life of the year of the 
eight-days week was to grow I . This prince, the counter- 
part of Tobit, released and buried a corpse arrested on 
account of the dead man's debts, the corpse of the dead 
year of the rule of the Great Bear, the Thigh-god, as the 
reckoner of the year. He spent all his money in paying 
the creditors of the dead year, and it was after paying the 
last penny that he and Jack, whom he had met after the 
burial of the corpse, set out on their travels like Raphael 
and Tobias. On their way Jack procured from a three- 
headed giant, the giant of the year of the three-headed 
Geryon, the Phoenician Charion {Orion), the god of the year 
of three seasons, the coat of darkness, the cap of knowledge, 
the sword of sharpness, and the shoes of swiftness, the outfit 
of the sun-gods Perseus and Sigurd. Provided with these, 
the equivalents of the heart, liver and gall of the alligator fish 
in the Tobit story, he and the prince arrive at the house 
of the lady the prince sought to marry, the Sara with seven 
husbands. The marriage was agreed to, provided the prince 
was able to bring her handkerchief, which she placed before 
him in her bosom, and to guess whose lips she kissed the 
last thing at night. She gave the handkerchief to Asmodeus, 
here called Lucifer, and kissed his lips ; but Jack followed 
her in the sun's night disguise, took the handkerchief, and 

1 Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, chap, ii., Arthur and Airem, pp. 25 ff. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 421 

cut off the homed head of Asmodeus, which he gave to the 
princess, who is shown by her two-year tasks to be originally 
the mother-bird of the solstitial sun-year of two seasons. It 
was after the death of the homed stone (ashma) god that she 
recovered her beauty and became the bride of the prince. 
For the transformation scene we must go back to the German 
version of the story, in which the bride when plunged into 
water by her lover becomes successively a raven and a dove* 
before she became a maiden. These changes we may com- 
pare with the raven and the dove sent forth from Noah's ark, 
the raven bird-mother of the matriarchal races who dis- 
appeared like the evil spirits which disfigured the princess* 
and the dove who returned as the marrying-bird of the 
patriarchal races with the olive leaf of the tree -mother 
Athene in her beak, the leaf sacred to the mother-goddess 
of Asia Minor. These changes are similar to those made 
by Thetis, the mud [thith) goddess, when wedded to Peleus, 
the god of the Potter's clay, before she became the mother 
of the sun-god Achilles. She became successively a lioness, 
a dragon, fire and water. Also the seal-god Proteus, called 
in the Odyssey the Egyptian god assistant of Poseidon, the 
ape-god of the river Nile, became, when caught by Menelaus, 
a lion, a dragon or serpent, a leopard, a boar, water, and 
a lofty tree I . These various forms depict the successive 
changes in the symbolic representations of the god who 
measured time in the images I have recorded in the previous 
pages of this book. 

The altar or house of the sun-god ruling the year of eight- 
day weeks, which was built by Jack the Giant-killer, appears 
again in the altar built by David on the threshing-floor 
of Araunah the Jebusite, the Jewish counterpart of the 
Hindu year-altar of the Brahmanas. It was built on the 
mountain of Jerusalem, which became the site of the later 
temple. This is now surmounted by an octagonal dome 
with its entrance gate at the North-west, the setting-point 

1 Homer, Odyssey, iv. 383, 386, 456 — 459. 



422 History and Chronology 

of the sun of the summer solstice x . David's altar was built 
to stay the plague among the people, that is, the plague 
brought, as we have seen, by the Angel of Death on the day 
of the ninth brick. This plague was sent, according to the 
Rabbinical commentator, when the conquering sun-god, the 
butcher, had overcome all his enemies 2 . Similarly, the 
plague stayed by the building of David's altar came at 
the close of his career after he had conquered all his oppo- 
nents. Among these the chief were, Hanan the merciful, 
the son of Nahash, king of the Ammonites 3, that is himself 
as Baal Hanan, who had caused Uriah the Hittite, w r hose 
name means Light is god, to be slain as a deceased year-god, 
and he was the twenty-ninth of his captains 4, the last day 
of the month in the year of Orion of twelve months of 
twenty-nine days each. After his death he married his wife 
Bath-sheba, she of the seven (sheba) measures, the seven 
wine-bearing stars of the Great Bear, and became the father 
of Solomon, the Akkadian Salli-manu, the fish-sun-god, who 
built the temple of the year. He had also defeated the 
conspiracies of Joab, the son of Zeruiah, daughter of Nahash, 
the Great Bear god, who sought to dethrone him and set up 
Absalom, the brother of Tamar, the date-palm-tree. 

This consecration of the sun-rock at Jerusalem, dedicated 
to the god of the eight-rayed star and the eight-days week, 
as the navel of the Semite earth marks an equally decisive 
period in the Hebrew history of the year as that marked in 
Hindu history by the sacrifice of Ashtaka. 

C. The Hindu gods of the eight-days week. 

This god, whose name means the eighth, was, as we have 
seen, the son of the two Jarat-karus, the heavenly fire-drill 

1 O'Neill, Night of the Gods, vol. i., The Number Eight, p. 167, The North, 

P. 443- 

2 2 Samuel xxiv. 19—25 ; Paterson Smith, The Old Documents and the New 
Bible, Second Edition, The Talmud and the Targums, p. 143. 

3 2 Samuel x. 1 ff. * 1 Chron. xi. 40. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 423 

and socket turned by the axle-star of the Great Bear, to 
which Ixion or Akshivan was bound as the turning-god. 
Ashtaka officiated as the chief-priest at the sacrifice at 
which Janamejaya, after conquering Takka-sila {Taxila), the 
stronghold of the Naga power, destroyed all the Naga snake- 
gods, except the three year-gods of the Takkas, Shesh Nag, 
Vasuk Nag, and Taksh Nag. Shesh Nag, the god of the 
spring season, had been made by Vasuki the ocean-snake 
encircling the mother-mountain, and he did not appear at 
the sacrifice. Vasuk Nag, the god of summer, was Ashtaka's 
maternal uncle, and he likewise did not appear. Taksh 
Nag, the god of winter, who had slain Parikshit, one of the 
gods of this epoch, whose history I will tell later on, was 
saved at the special intercession of Ashtaka z . 

The altar on which this sacrifice was offered was that 
of the eight-rayed star of which the image was drawn on the 
ground consecrated for the building of the later brick altar 
of the year-sun-bird rising in the East, the altar measuring 
in the number of its bricks and stages the whole year. This 
altar, of which I have given a short description in Chapter V. 
pp. 269, 270, as depicted on the Breton Linga altar 2 , is ordered 
in the ritual of the building of the bird-altar to be marked on 
the consecrated ground by the sacred plough made of the 
Udumbara fig-tree drawn by oxen attached to the plough by 
traces of Munja grass, of which are made the three-strand 
girdles of the Brahmins, denoting the three seasons of the 
year. The sides of this square altar face the cardinal points, 
and the first lines marking it are begun at the South- 
west corner, the setting point of the sun-bird of the year 
beginning at the winter solstice. The first line traced is 
from the South-west to the South-east corner, the second 
from the South-west to the North-west, the third from the 
North-west to the North-east, and the fourth from the North- 
east to the South-east completes the square marking the 



1 Mahabharata Adi [Faushya) Parva, iii. p. 45. 

2 Mahabharata Adi (Asiika) Parva, lvi. — lviii. pp. 154 — 159. 



1TW V x ; ^ NE 
the six-days week l . w - 



424 History and CJironologv 

year circuit of the 1 sun-bird. The first cross line drawn is 
that of the Pole Star, due South and North from the centre 
of the line from the South-west to the South-east to mark 
the year measured by the Pleiades and Canopus in their 
annual course round the Pole. Then a line is drawn from 
the South-west to the North-east to mark the year of 
the solstitial flying- bird beginning with the setting of the 
sun at the winter solstice in the South-west. Then the 
line drawn due West and East from the centre of the West 
line to mark the equinoctial year included in the three-years 
cycle, and lastly the line from the North-west to the South- 
east to denote the year of the eight-rayed star as measured 
from the setting sun of the summer solstice, the year of 

Bf 

e Under this arrangement the 

SE 

altar is divided into eight divisions, representing the eight 
points of the compass and the eight days of the week, and 
it represents all the primitive ruling years. The Hindu 
sun-god of this year was the sexless sun-god Bhishma, also 
called Dyu, light. He was the son of Shantanu, the healer, 
the great-grandfather of the Kauravyas and Pandavas and 
of Gunga, the river-mother who identified him, as we are told 
in the Mahabharata 2 , with the god Dyu who stole Nandini 
the year-cow of Vashishtha, the chief star in the Great Bear 
and the god of the perpetual fire on the altar, for the daughter 
of Ushlnara, who was, as we have seen, the wife of Kakshivat, 
the god of the eleven-months year. Bhishma was the eighth 
son. She threw into the river, to which she gave her name, 
her first seven sons as soon as they were born, that is to say, 
killed them like the seven husbands of Sara, and left her 
husband and her home on earth directly her eighth son 
was born, just as Jarat-karu quitted his wife when he had 
done his duty as the departing sun-god and given life 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Bra/i., vii. 2, 2, 3—14; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 326— 330. 

2 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, xcviii., xcix. pp. 293 — 297. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 425 

to his newly born son Ashtaka. Gunga took her child 
also, called Devavrata, or the law {vratd) of God, and sent 
him back to earth, when he was grown up, to remain there 
for a time as the god ruling the year. He was thus like 
the sun who was nursed for the first three months of his 
life by the thirty stars. 

His genealogy, as told in Rg. x. 72, declares that he 
was created by Brahmanas-pati, the Pole Star god who 
from the non-existent brought forth the parent of the 
existent, Uttanapad, the god with the out-stretched legs, 
the roots of the mother-tree, the original female symbol 
f\ of the two productive thighs. From this was born Aditi, 

the beginning without (a) a second (diti), and Daksha, the 
showing god of the open hand and the five fingers of the five- 
days week. They begot the gods of time who brought the 
sun-god Su-rya from the sea (with the rains of the summer 
solstice). To Aditi were born seven sons, which she took 
away with her, leaving on earth the eighth, the Mart-anda 
or dead egg (anda), the sexless sun-god. 

Thus this god, as Bhishma Dyu or Mart-anda, is as clearly 
born from the seven thigh stars of the Great Bear as the 
other national sun-gods of this epoch. On his rising on 
earth he became the king of the land of Jambu-dwipa, the 
country of the Jambu-tree or North India, the home of the 
Bharata race lying South of Sakadwipa, the Northern land of 
the Kushika r . He ruled during the reigns of Chitr-angada 
and Vichitra Virya, sons of Shantanu by Satyavati, the 
fish-mother-goddess, and during the infancy of the Kauravya 
and Pandava, grandsons of Vichitra Virya. He also led 
the Kauravya army during the first ten days of their eighteen 
days' battle with Pandavas. He bore on his banner the date- 
palm-tree, the mother-tree of the eleven-months year, sur- 
mounted with the five stars, called in the Rigveda " five bulls 
or eagles " which sit in the midst of heaven and hold back 
the " devouring wolf," who tries to enter the watery home 

* Mahabharata Bhishma {Jamvu-khanda Nirmand) Parva, ix. — xi. pp. 29 — 39. 



426 History and Chronology 

of their realm, the treasure-house of the rain-god \ These 
stars are the Pole Star and the four stars said in the Zenda- 
vesta to rule the four quarters of the heavens : 1. Tishtrya or 
Sirius, ruling the East ; 2. The seven stars of the Great Bear, 
the Haptoiringas or seven bulls, the North ; 3. Vanant or 
Corvus, the West ; and, 4. Satavaesa or Argo, the South. 
These are also the four Loka-palas of the Hindus 2 . Of these 
the constellation Hasta, the hand or Corvus, that of the 
five-day weeks of the hand of Daksha, is the ruling constella- 
tion of the Pandavas, who are compared to its five stars 
as they stood round Drona their tutor, the god of the 
tree-trunk 3. It was to the centre god of these five ruling 
bulls that the Pandavas betook themselves after their first 
victory won by Arjuna, who alone, except Kama, the horned 
lunar-solar god of the three-years cycle, could string the bow 
of Krishanu, the rainbow-god, provided for those who entered 
the contest for the hand of Drupadi. Drupadi refused to 
accept Kama as a suitor. Arjuna after stringing the bow 
in Pushya (December — January), the month of the winter 
solstice, when the wedding took place, and on the 16th, or 
full-moon day, shot through the central mark in the sky, 
the palace of the Pole Star, five arrows, the five seasons of the 
year of the five Pandava brethren, of which I shall give the 
full account in Chapters VIII. and IX. He thus repeated 
the feat of Krishanu and won the hand of Drupadi for the 
five Pandava brethren. It was when the bride was won 
that they went to the house of the Potter, the master Pole 
Star, where the marriage was consummated 4. 

It was at the end of the Magh year, the end of December 
— January, that the Pandava wedding took place. This was 
the year of Bhishma, who died, as we are expressly told 
in the Mahabharata, at the end of his year on the first of 

1 Rg. i. 105, 10, 11. 

" Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv., pp. 33 1, 332. 
3 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxxxvii. p. 403. 

* Mahabharata Adi {Swayam-vara) Parva, clxxxvii., clxxxix., cxc, cxcii. 
PP- 524, 526, 53°. 532, 538, 558. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 427 

Magh (January — February), when the sun had begun its 
Northward course *. 

The Hindu god who was the counterpart of Bhishma 
and the charioteer of Arjuna the Pandava leader, as Bhishma 
was generalissimo of the Kauravyas, was Krishna. He who 
was like David the youngest of eight sons was born, accord- 
ing to the popular mythology of,Mathura his birthplace, 
on the eighth of Bhadon or Bhadra-pada, or at the end 
of the first week of the second six months, the second stage 
of this year in its second form dating from 8200 B.C., begin- 
ning in Phalgun (February — March) 2 . His father was Vasu- 
deva, the son of the creating-god Vasu, and his mother 
Devaki. They were brought from Goburdhan on the Jumna, 
the place sacred to the keeper of the cattle of Ra-hu, to 
Mathura, sacred to the god of the fire-drill (math), by Kansa, 
the goose-king of the eleven-months year, in order that he 
might prevent the fulfilment of the prophecy that the eighth 
son of Vasudeva and Devaki would kill him. He killed 
successively their first six sons, but to avoid the slaughter 
of the seventh the embryo from which he was to be born was 
transferred from the womb of Devaki to that of Jasoda, mean- 
ing the exhausted or superseded goddess, wife of Nanda of 
Go-kul, the cow-pen, the male god of the Nand-gaon hill. 
Nanda was, in the local legend of the birth of the Bharata, 
husband of Ra-dha, the maker [dha] of Ra, the sun-god, 
whose sacred hill was Barsana, divided from Nandgaon 
by the valley of the grove of Sanket or the " place of assig- 
nation " where the lovers met, as the matriarchal village- 
mothers met their lovers from the next village in the village 
grove. Barsana and Nandgaon are the two sacred hills 
of the Bharatpur range, the mother-hills of the Bharatas3. 
Nanda's wife Jasoda is also called in local legend RohinI, 
the star Aldebaran, who was, as we have seen, called, like 
Ra-dha, the mother of the sun-god, and she as wife of Nanda 

1 Mahabharata Anushasana (Swarja-rohanika) Parva, clxvii. pp. 776. 

3 Mathura, a District Memoir, by F. S. Growse, pp. 50 — 63. 

3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay v., pp. 450 — 453. 



428 History and Chronology 

was the Nandini, the year-cow of Vashistha stolen by Dyu, 
the eighth god of the Bhishma series of sun-gods. 

The son born from this transferred embryo, a process 
which appears in the birth stories of all Jain Tirthakaras I , 
was Valarama, the seventh son of Vasudeva and DevakI, 
called Halayudha, he who has the plough {ha I) for his 
weapon. His banner was the date-palm-tree, but not sur- 
mounted by the five stars crowning the palm-tree of 
Bhishma 2 . He who stood aloof from the contest between 
the Kauravyas and Pandavas was thus the leading star in 
the Plough and Bear constellations. This was the plough 
borne on the banner of Shalya, god of the arrow-year 3. 
He was king of the Madras, who led the Kauravya army 
at their final defeat, and was father of Madrl, the intoxicated 
{mad) mother of the two youngest Pandavas, whose fathers 
were the Ashvins 4. 

The birth of Valarama from the six mother Pleiades, his 
deceased brethren, signified the marriage of RohinI their 
queen with the seven Rishis or antelopes of the Great Bear, 
a marriage succeeding her first union with Orion. It was 
to celebrate this union that the year of the god of the 
antelope's head {mriga - sirshd) was made the national 
year beginning in Mriga-sirsha (November — December) 5, 
that is to say when the sun was in Taurus in that month 
about 12,200 B.C., a year of the age of the eleven-months 
year. 

It was from the union of the Pleiades and Aldebaran with 
the stars of the Thigh that the god Krishna was born. 
Though the local legend of Mathura fixes his birthday on 
the eighth day of the light half of Bhadon, yet in Bombay 
and the South of India it is celebrated on the eighth day 

1 Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Kalpa Sutra, Lives of the Jainas, 30; S.B.E., vol. 
xxii. p. 229. 

2 Mahabharata Shalya {Gut-Aytidha) Parva, xxiv. and Ix. pp. 135, 233. 

3 Mahabharata Drona (Jayad-ratha-badha) Parva, cv. p. 297. 

4 Mahabharata Adi (Samb/iava) Parva, cxxiv. pp. 364, 365. 

s Eggeling, Sat. Bra/i., ii. 1, 2, 6—8; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 283, 284. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 429 

of the dark half of Shravana (July — August), or about the 
8th of August; and it is stated in the Harivansa LVII. 
to have taken place on the eighth day of the dark half 
of Bhadon (Bhadrapadci), about the 8th of September, and 
this is the date at which the festival is generally celebrated 
throughout Northern India *. 

The Harivansa tells us it took place like that of the 
Kauravyas and Pandavas under Abhijit the Star Vega, 
that is between 10,000 and 8000 B.C., and as the date varied 
from July — August to' August — September it marked the 
middle of a year beginning when the sun was in Gemini 
in January — February and in February — March. 

Krishna when born was carried by his father, who eluded 
the guards of Kansa, across the Jumna to Gokul, on the 
east bank of the river, and there consigned to Nanda and 
Jasoda. From the latter Vasudeva took away her newly- 
born daughter, the twin-sister of Krishna, and placed her 
in the bed of Devakl, the bed of the year-god and goddess. 
When the guards of Kansa came to slay the newly-born 
eighth son she rose up to heaven as the mountain-goddess 
Durga or Su-bhadra, the blessed Su-bird, the goddess 
to be borne in the chariot of the Ashvins, as the star 
Capella in the chariot constellation Auriga, to her wedding 
as the virgin Suria or Su-konya with Soma the moon-god. 
She is called in the Harivansa LVIII. the goddess of the 
sun and moon, and is described as Kushika, the goddess 
of the Kushika, bearing the trident of the year of three 
seasons and the lance of KuntI, the lance-mother of the 
Pandavas, the lance that pierces the rain-clouds and lights 
the year's fires. Her dress was black with a yellow upper 
garment, and she wore a collar of pearls round her neck and 
the pearl earrings of the moon-goddess. Her banner was 
a peacock's tail, that is of the Greek Here married to Zeus 
in Gamelion (January — February), and of the Mayura kings 



1 Monier Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India, Hindoo Fasts, 
Festivals, and Holidays, pp. 430, 431. 



430 History and Chronology 

of the Bharata. She is called the goddess of the ninth day 
of the dark end of the eleventh day of the light half of the 
month, that is of the years of nine and eleven-day weeks, 
who was worshipped as the goddess Kail, to whom human 
and animal sacrifices were offered during those epochs. 
Her birthday, the 8th of September, is the day consecrated 
as the birthday of the Virgin Mother in the Roman Church, 
which took place nine months after the festival of the 
Immaculate Conception on the 8th of December, that is 
in the dark half of the Hindu month Mrigasirsha (November 
— December). Both the Indian and Christian goddess- 
mother are called with equal reverence The Blessed One. 
Krishna, the son and brother of the virgin-mother-goddess, 
the star Aldebaran who had become in astronomical evo- 
lution Capella, was born on the same day as his twin-sister. 
One of their birthdays, that on the 8th of Bhadon, the 
23rd of August, is also the birthday of the Pythian Apollo, 
called Paian or the healing-god, the sun-physician. He was 
born on the 7th of Metageitnion (August — September), 
called Boukatios at Delphi r , that is to say the 22nd of 
August ; but this number seven became sacred as the week 
of Apollo in the year of the next epoch, the seventeen 
months of seven days each, and was doubtless derived from 
the seven stars of the Great Bear, his father's constellation. 
It was on his birthday that the Pythian games began, which 
were originally held every eighth year in memory of the 
eight-days week, and they opened with hymns sung in 
honour of Apollo Paian, who slew with his arrows the Python 
snake who had inspired the oracles of Delphi during the age 
of the eleven-months year when the Ephod was worshipped 2 . 
This snake was the Dragon of the oracle which Pausanias 
says Apollo slew at his birth 3. Its name Python is the 
Greek form of Budhnya in the name of the Vedic god Ahi 
Budhnya, the snake of the depths, the Greek Buthos, called 

1 Hesiod, Works and Days, 771 sq. ; Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. pp 244,245. 

2 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. v. p. 242. 

3 Ibid., x. 7, 3, vol. i. p. 507. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 43 1 

also Ahi Shuva, or the swelling snake, which Indra slew 
when accompanied by the Maruts *. These Maruts, the 
daughters of the tree {marom) ape-god Maroti, are said 
in the sacrifice offered to celebrate the great victory of Indra, 
Apollo or Krishna to be seven in number, who danced round 
Indra as he killed the Vritra or enclosing snake 2 , that is 
to say, they were the mother-goddesses of the young sun- 
god, son of the Thigh with its seven stars. In the next 
hymn to that describing the victory of Indra and the Maruts, 
Indra's mother, called Shavasi, the strong one, who was, as we 
have seen in Chapter VI. p. 350, the Polar mother-tree from 
whose side he was born, calls her dead foe Ahi-shuva Aurna- 
vabha 3, the son of the weaver of wool, that is of the spinning 
mother Pleiades who bore the ram-sun of the cycle - year. 
This slain snake is invoked in another hymn as Ahi-budhnya, 
who is called on to bestow health as a healing god, and 
to come accompanied by the children of the waters, who 
bring the stallion swift as thought, the god Dadhiank of 
the horse's head 4. This year of the slaying of the snake 
by the new-born sun-god, told in this series of national year 
histories, is the year of Krishna, the black sun-antelope, and 
Valarama, the parent-plough star-god of the year of fifteen 
months. It was, as we have seen, the year of the first victory 
of the Pandavas in which they won the tree-mother-goddess 
Drupadl, and in which Arjuna married Su-bhadra on the 
Raivataka hill, on which Arishtanemi, the sun-god of the 
eleven-months year, attained perfection on the 6th day of 
the light half of Shravana (July — August), about the 20th 
of July s. This Raivataka hill is consecrated to Revati 
f Piscium, the 27th Nakshatra, that is, to the star marking 
the close of the year of one epoch and the beginning of 

1 Rg. viii. 65, 1—3. 

3 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., ii. 5, 3, 20; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 416. 

3 Rg. viii. 66, 1, 2. * Rg. i. 186, 5. 

s Jacobi, Jaina Sutras, Kalpa Sutra, Life of Arishtanemi, 173; S.B.E., 
vol. xxii. p. 277. We have seen on p. 428, that according to the mythology 
of Bombay and the South of India Krishna was born on the 8th day of the 
dark half of Shravana. 



432 History and Chronology 

another. Hence the change of state attained by Arishta-^ 
nemi on this hill marked the close of his year of eleven 
months, and the opening of that ruled by Arjuna and Su- 
bhadra, the nominees of Krishna, who, with Rama, wor- 
shipped Arishtanemi on his renunciation of the rule of the 
year in favour of the new gods of the fifteen-months year. 
He was followed on his retirement by Raji-mati or Rai-mati, 
the mother of Ra, the sun-god, a variant form of Ra-dha, 
wife of Nanda. She who was in the Jain birth story daughter 
of Vasu-deva, the Bhoja king by his wife Rohini, the star 
Aldebaran, had been chosen by Krishna as the bride of 
Arishtanemi, and she on his abdication became, like him, 
a naked ascetic T , that is, they were stripped of the panoply 
of the year-god and numbered among the dead years. 

D. The year of the Mahommedan Twins. 

We have seen that this year is ruled by the constellation 
Gemini, and valuable historical evidence as to the relations 
between this year and the constellation can be gained from 
the year of the Mahommedan Arabs as arranged in Mahom- 
medan ritual. It began with the 15th of July, the first of 
Mohurrum, when Mahommed went from Mecca to Medina, 
and this year is closely connected with the twins Al Hasain 
and Al Hosein, who are called in Mahommedan history the 
sons of Ali and grandsons of Mahommed. But to these 
have been attached attributes which were originally those 
of the twin year- gods who had been worshipped in South- 
western Asia for thousands of years before Mahommed. 
We have seen that this year of fifteen months is one with 
two beginnings, one in January — February and the other 
February — March, marking the times when the sun was 
in Gemini in those two months. We find a similar change 
in the Arab year beginning with the birth of the Arabian 
twins. Their first birth is said to be on the 3rd Sha'ban, 

1 Jacobi, Jaina Sutras Uttaradhyayana, Lect. xxii. I — 32 ; S.B.E., vol, 
xxii. pp. 112— 116. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 433 

February — March, when Jerusalem ceased to be the Kebla 
and Mecca was substituted for it. Jerusalem was the site 
of the Sabaean worship in which men prayed turning to 
the North, the religious attitude succeeding that of the 
Harranites, worshippers of Laban, who, as AlberunI tells us, 
turned, like the Roman augurs, to the South. The second 
date of the birth was the 6th of Ramadan (March — April), 
inaugurating the New Year beginning at the vernal equinox. 
That these births marked the beginning of a year divided 
into two periods of six months each is shown by the reputed 
death of the twins. This is celebrated by the Shias of 
Persia on the 10th of Moharrum (July — August), or six 
months after their birth in February — March, and the news 
of the death of Al Hasan was brought to Damascus on the 
1st of Safar (August — September), six months after the 
second birth 1 . 

E. The Roman gods of the year of eight-day weeks and the 
year of Lug. 
The history of the earlier Twin year-gods, beginning their 
year when the sun was in Gemini in January — February, 
can be further illustrated from the Roman ritual chiefly 
derived from Umbria and Etruria, that is, from Tyrrhenian 
sources which go back to India. The first of January at 
Rome was dedicated to a god called ^Esculapius Vediovis, 
the island Vediovis worshipped at Rome and Bovillae. At 
Rome he had two temples, one between the Arx and the 
Capitol hill, and one on the Tiber island. He was repre- 
sented as a young god holding arrows like Arjuna or Apollo; 
a goat stood beside him and was sacrificed to him 2 . He 
thus resembles the Pre-Mahommedan god Hobal at Mecca, 
with seven arrows in his hand, the seven stars of the Great 
Bear, in whose temple there were 360 gods, the days of the 

1 Sachau, Alberuni's Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap, xx., The Festivals 
of the Moslems, pp. 326, 328 — 330. 

2 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Januarius I, p. 277, Maius, 21, 
p. 121, Martius Non, 7, p. 43. 

F f 



434 History and Chronology 

year 1 . He is one of three gods worshipped at Mecca as 
three stones, Hobal, Lata, and Uzza 2 . They are mentioned 
in the Koran as the old Arab deities, Allat, Al 'Huzza, and 
Manat. Allat is the god called by Herodotus iii. 8, Alilat, 
a female form of Dionysos called Orotal, the Akkadian 
goddess of the nether world with the same name, a form 
of the Southern mother Bahu, worshipped as the light moon. 
Al 'Huzza or Uzza was the bisexual god and goddess of the 
two moons united, the full-moon goddess worshipped as an 
acacia-tree, the tree-mother of the sun-god Manat, the dark 
moon worshipped as a huge sacrificial stone 3. 

Thus this god Vediovis, like Hobal, was the male form 
of the bisexual lunar deities of the cycle-year, and, as the 
god of the temple between two groves, he is the Latin form 
of the Hindu Nanda and Radha parents of the Bharata race, 
who used to meet at Sanket, the " place of assignation " 
between the two hills dedicated to them. As he was origi- 
nally a god of the cycle-year of nine-day weeks, his festival 
took place on the 9th of January. He is then called a god 
of the Agon, that is of the Collis Agonis, another name for 
the Quirinal hill of the Sabines, which was outside the 
Palatine city of Romulus 4. On this day the Rex Sacrorum, 
priest of the Regia, where the vestal fire was, sacrificed a 
ram to the god of the hill called Janus Geminus, the twin 
(Geminus), instead of the goat offered to him as Vediovis, 
the god of the Pole Star age. As the name Janus comes 
from the same root as Janua, the doors, he is clearly a god 
strictly analogous to the Egyptian and Phoenician Ptah, the 
opener, the beginner of the year, and a Latin counterpart 
of the Hindu Varuna, the Lokapala of the North, whose 
victim was the ram. The gate called after him Janus was 

1 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. i. pp. 86, 263. 

2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. vi. p. 408. 

3 Palmer, The Quran, chap. liii. v. 19, 20; S.B.E., vol. ix. p. 252, vol. vi. 
Introduction, p. xii. ; Tiele, Outlines of the History of the Ancient Religions, 
p. 67. 

* Mommsen, History of Rome, Translated by Dickson, Popular Edition, 
vol. i. p. 86, 



of the Myth- Making Age. 435 

the North-east gate of Rome, that of the rising sun of the 
summer solstice, and his images on coins show him as a god 
with two heads, that is, as a god of the year of two seasons 
of the solstitial sun who originally began his year at sunset 
at the winter solstice, the god of the South-west and North- 
east line on the altar of the eight-rayed star. But as the god 
of the gate, the oldest Roman god, whose priest was the 
Rex Sacrorum, ruling the opening of the year, the month 
and the day, he has become the two door-posts, the con- 
stellation Gemini guarding the gate of the Garden of God, 
the constellation in which the sun was on the 9th of January 
about 12,200 B.C., or the beginning of the age of the eleven- 
months year T . Following this festival of the firstborn of the 
Twin gods, the bisexual twins who were originally male and 
female gods, the Mithuna of the Hindu zodiac, we have the 
Carmentalia of the nth and 15th of January, and on the 
former day the fountain of Juturna, that of the sun-horse, 
was worshipped. 

Carmenta was, as Ovid tells us, a prophet-goddess who 
told the fortunes of children, and had apparently two forms 
called Porrima and Postverta. She was a goddess of the 
South, to whom no animal victims were offered, for no 
leather or anything dead was allowed near her temple. She 
was probably a form of the solstitial year-bird, as a prophetess 
whose festival had been instituted in the age when the sun 
was in Gemini in December — January, as the year-festival 
of the year-bird originally born at the winter solstice. Her 
mid-year festival was the Lucaria of the 19th and 21st of 
July, divided like the January festival into two parts, sepa- 
rated in January by four and in July by three days. The 
Lucaria was a festival of the goddess of groves (lucar, htcus), 
and was apparently a tribal festival of the Luceres, as that 
of Janus was of the Sabine Titienses 2 . The Luceres were 

1 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Januarius, pp. 2S0 — 282, 
286— 2S9. 

2 Ibid., Mensis Januarius, Carmentalia, pp. 290 — 293, Mensis Quinctilis 
Lucaria, pp. 182 — 185. 

F f 2 



436 History and Chronology 

not only sons of the grove but of the wolf-sun-god, the Greek 
Lukos, who had come to Italy with the Umbrians, who 
brought, as we have seen, the priests who introduced into 
Italy the Indian ritual of the Pole Star age, and who wore, 
like the priests of the Hindu Pitaro Barishadah, the sacrificial 
cord on the right shoulder. 

The next January festival was the Ferise Sementivae, or 
the Paganalia of the three days from the 24th to the 26th 
of January. This was the Roman ploughing festival of the 
year, when the plough oxen were decorated with garlands 
and cakes, and a pregnant sow was offered I . This festival 
is one clearly allied to the great Magh (January — February) 
festival of the Indian Mundas, and other cognate tribes, with 
which they begin their year. Also to the January plough- 
ing festival observed in most countries in the world, which 
I will discuss in full later on when I come to the ploughing 
festival of the Buddha. 

The last of the Roman festivals of January is that of the 
27th of the month, the dedication at Praeneste of the temple 
of Castor and Pollux, the Great Twin Brethren who bathed 
their steeds, after the battle of the Lake Regillus, in the 
Juturna fountain, worshipped on the nth of January. 
They were the twins who, as we have seen, ruled all the 
feasts of the month 2 . 

In the February half of the month of Magh three festivals 
intimately connected took place almost simultaneously : — 
The Fornicaria, which closed on the 17th of February, but 
we are not told when it began ; the Parentalia lasted for eight 
days, the week of the year, from the 13th to the 21st of 
• February, and the Lupercalia was celebrated on the 15th 3. 
They all appear with the festivals of the end of January 
to form part of one great national festival inaugurating the 
beginning of the year, and consecrating the whole month of 

1 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Januarius Feriae Semen- 
tivae Paganalia, pp. 294—296. 

2 Ibid., Mensis Januarius, /Edes Castoris et Pollucis dedicata, pp. 296, 297. 

3 Ibid., Mensis Februarius, pp. 302 — 324. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 437 

January — February to festivity, as the Mundas in India 
consecrate the whole of Magh to dancing and revelry. 

The Fornicaria was a feast of grain roasted like the grain 
of the Picts and Indian Pitaro Barishadah, and made into 
cakes. These were eaten at a common meal held in each 
of the Curise, or thirty villages, communities into which 
the Latins were divided ; and the festival of the Ouirinalia 
on the 17th February, which ended it, was a meeting of all 
the Curiae, at which every man who had failed to celebrate 
the feast in his own Curia might attend and remedy his 
omission. It was, in short, a festival beginning the year 
with a 'recognition and assertion of national brotherhood. 
It was held in the temple of Ouirinus on the Palatine hill. 
The two myrtles in front of it were survivors of the two 
Phoenician pillars. 

The Parentalia was the national feast to the dead of the 
Vestal Virgins {Virgo Vestalis Parentalia), that is, of the race 
who introduced the sexless gods of the cycle-year, and the 
cult of the household fire tended by the virgin daughters of 
the national king. While it lasted all temples were closed 
and no marriages allowed. This custom accords with the 
Ooraon rule that no marriages can take place till the 
bones of the dead of the past year, who have been burnt 
after their death, are collected from the poles in front of 
each house where they have been placed, and buried in the 
burying-place of the family of the deceased. The custom 
of burying-the dead of each family in the village where 
their ancestors first settled is a survival of the city of the 
dead in which all Akkadians and Mundas used to be buried. 
That of the Mundas is in the province of Tamar, in the 
Lohardugga district. The common funerals of the Ooraons 
take place in December — January, before the month of 
Magh. The offerings made at the tombs of the dead during 
the Parentalia were water, wine, milk, honey, and the blood of 
black victims. In each household, as Ovid tells us, a family 
festival, called the Caristia, was held on the 22nd of Feb- 



43 8 History and Chronology 

ruary, the ninth day of the Parentalia, when all the family 
ate together. On the night before this festival, called the 
Feralia, an old woman, an accredited sorceress, performed 
rites to the goddess Tacita or Dea Muta, the silent-goddess, 
the survival of Bahu, the mother-goddess of the Abyss, the 
female pair of the Hindu Prajapati (Orion), who was wor- 
shipped in whispers x . With three fingers she placed three 
bits of incense at the entrance of a mouse-hole, that of 
Apollo Smintheus, the mouse-god of death, to keep him aloof 
from the house. Muttering a spell, she wove white woollen 
threads in a dark coloured web, the mingled shades of 
day and night, and kept, while she was weaving, seven 
black beans in her mouth, sacred to the seven stars of the 
Great Bear. She then took a fish, the mcena, the wonder- 
working fish of the Tobit story, smeared its head with 
pitch, sewed its mouth up, dropped wine on it and roasted 
it before the fire, as Tobias roasted the entrails of the fish 
to drive away Asmodeus. The rest of the wine she drank 
with the girls of the house who assisted at the service 2 . 

The Lupercalia was held on the 15th of February, one of 
the days of the Parentalia. It took place at the cave called 
Lupercal, in the South-western corner of the Palatine hill, 
where the Tiber had deposited the wolf-nurtured twins, 
Romulus and Remus, under the sacred fig-tree. Hence 
it was a festival of the Ramnes, sons of the wolf, and the 
mother-tree Silvia, the wood (silva) goddess, who had, as 
Leto, the tree-trunk, borne Apollo, the wolf, and Artemis, the 
Great Bear goddess, on the yellow river Xanthus in Lycia. 

The festival began with the sacrifice of a goat and a dog, 
the mother of fire, the Hindu Matari-shvan, the mother 
of the dog. They were sacrificed by the two Luperci. Cakes 
were also offered, made by the Vestals from the first ears of 
last year's harvest some of which had been already used at 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah. i. 4, 5, 12 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. p. 131. 

2 Ovid, Fasti, 2, 571 if. ; W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis 
Februarius, pp. 308, 309. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 439 

the Vestalia on the 9th of June and the 9th of September, 
the first offering of the ears being more than eight and the 
second more than five months before this last, which seems 
to be the birth-festival of the wolf-sun born of the last year's 
corn and quickened in September. After the sacrifices the 
race of the Luperci began. The runners were divided into 
two companies, each headed by one of the noble Luperci 
youths, one of whom belonged to the Collegia of the Fabii 
of the Quirinal, and the other to that of the Quinctii of 
the Palatine hill. Their foreheads were smeared with the 
knife dyed with the blood of the victims they had slain, 
and were then wiped with wool dipped in milk, which as a 
bath of purification cleansed them of the guilt of the slaughter. 
They were then obliged to laugh as children of the goat 
and dog, who rejoiced over their new birth as offspring 
of the sun-cow born from the sun-ram. They who had 
been naked hitherto girt themselves with the skins of the 
goats, the dress of the Akkadian priests and of the Hindu 
Vaishya at their initiation, and after feasting ran round the 
base, or part of the base, of the Palatine hill, striking at all 
the women who came near them or offered themselves 
to their blows with strips of skin of the hides of the victims 
which were supposed to produce fertility. 

The course round the Palatine hill is described by Tacitus 
as starting from the Lupercal and passing by the shrine 
of the Lares and the Forum. This ran from South-west 
to North-east, the course of the original sun-bird, and the 
sunward course of the Roman augurs who turned their faces 
to the South with the West to their right hand, so that 
the West was the lucky side from which the runners were 
to start Northwards by West to East. But it is improbable 
that both the bands went in the same direction, for we shall 
see in Chapter VIII., when I describe the similar race round 
the town boundaries of the Umbrian Gubbio on Whit- 
Monday, that the party bearing the three Ceri representing 
the god of the year of three seasons ran with the course 
of the sun, while the priestly procession went against it, 



440 History and Chronology 

and both parties met at the South-east point of the 
course, the rising-place of the sun of the winter solstice. 

The festival is certainly one denoting the close of one 
year and the beginning of another consecrated to the sun- 
god, son of the dog Sirius, who as the dog-star rules the 
mid-months of the year ; and the two bands of runners, one 
taking the pre-solar and the other the solar direction, marked 
the union of the worshippers of the wolf sun-god of the 
Palatine with the Sabines of the Ouirinal worshippers of the 
Phoenician cave-mother, before whose temple the twin- 
pillars were placed. 

It marks a year beginning about the 15th of February, 
or on the 1st of February — March, the Hindu month Arjuna 
or Phalgun, that of the consummation of the wedding of the 
sun-maiden Suria, beginning when the sun was in February 
— March, that is about 8000 B.C. The year thus begun 
corresponds to that of our popular mythology beginning 
with St. Valentine's Day, when the birds pair. 

The inauguration of the year by a religious ceremony 
designed to make the women fertile seems to show clearly 
that this year was originally begun, like the Magh year 
of the Ho Kols, by a general pairing of the population at the 
dances introducing it. At these the men and women of 
adjoining villages met as the people of the Palatine and 
Quirinal did at the Lupercal, and their meeting on this 
authorised day of union was followed at the end of the 
period of gestation by the birth of the children then be- 
gotten. Similar tribal birthdays must have followed other 
authorised festivals of meeting, at which alone women could 
legally conceive. Hence we understand how in the history 
of Cuchulainn he and his father Lug were alone able to 
defend their Ulster possessions against the Fir Bolg as all the 
other men were laid up with the sickness of the couvade *, 
the simulated lying-in of the father when his wife was 
confined. This story clearly points to a time when all 
the Ulster ladies were brought to bed at the same time. 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi. pp. 627, 628. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 44 1 

The beginning of this year was apparently celebrated 
by a second sacrifice on the 24th of February, at the end 
of the first nine-days week of this year. It is not certain 
whether the victim was a goat or an ox, but Plutarch says 
that it was offered in the Agora or central market-place 
of the city, and that the Rex Sacrorum after killing the 
victim ran away. The flight after this expiatory sacrifice, 
offered to drive out malevolent wizard-gods, is exactly 
similar to the flight of the Indian priest after killing the 
lamb offered at the autumnal equinox at the opening festival 
of the cycle-year described in Chapter V. p. 224. Also to 
that of the sacrifice of a bull-calf to Dionysos at Tenedos, 
when the priest fled away ; and this may have been the spring 
sacrifice to Dionysos said by Hesychius to have taken place 
in Anthesterion (February — March), that is at the beginning 
of the Lupercalia year I . The flight apparently represented 
the disappearance of the year-father of the new year, when 
he quits his functions at the end of his year and leaves the 
rule of the coming year to his son. 

The Mid-year Festival of this year in the Roman ritual 
was that of the 12th of August to Herculi-invicto, the 
unconquered Hercules who ruled this year. It is the first 
of a series of festivals lasting to the close of the month. 
That to Diana of the Aventine and other gods on the 13th, 
the Portunalia on the 17th, the Vinalia on the 19th, the 
Consualia on the 21st, the Mundus Patet on the 24th, the 
Opiconsivia on the 25th. 

The first of these is clearly the festival celebrating the 
victory of Hercules over Cacus, called Kakios by Diodorus, 
who has been proved by M. Breal to represent the god 
of the South-west wind Kaikias, said by Aristotle to bring 
up the rain 2 . He dwelt in a cave on the Aventine to the 
South-west of the Palatine, and Hercules is said in Virgil's 

1 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Februarius Regifugium, 
P- 327- 

- M. Breal, Hercule ct Cacus, chap. ii. , La Legende Latine, pp. 61, 62, 
chap, vi., Formation de la Fable, p. Ill, 



44 2 History and Chronology 

graphic description of the contest to have fought him after 
he had slain the three-headed Geryon, the Phcenician 
Charion or Orion, the god of the year of three seasons I . 
Cacus is described by Virgil as a half-human Centaur, that 
is a god of the eleven- months year, who belonged to the 
three-headed brood. The Porta Trigemina commemorates 
the victory of Hercules over this three-headed antagonist. 

At the approach of his vanquisher Cacus retreated into his 
cave, which he closed behind him, taking with him four bulls 
and four heifers, the eight days of the week. He drew them 
inside by their tails, an incident denoting the retrograde path 
of the zodiac, from right to left, followed by the astronomers 
of the eleven-months year and still preserved by the Chinese 2 . 
But the Latin god Hercules, who advanced directly to meet 
his foe, who retreated with backward steps, is not the Herakles 
of the Greeks, the Phcenician Ar-chal, but the guardian-god 
of the demarcated family properties of the ploughing race, 
the god of the enclosing fence, the Greek Herkos (ep/cos), 
the Hindu Lakshman, the boundary-god who kept the sun 
in his ordained course through the stars. He was the Sabine 
sowing-god Semo Sancus, who is also said to have conquered 
Cacus, that is, the sower of the sacred grass {sagmen), that 
carried as a sign of their mission by all Roman ambassadors 3, 
and the Sabine Salii officiated at the memorial sacrifice of 
the victory on the Ara Maxima. 

The other name of the conquering-god, Recaranus, clearly 
explains the meaning of the story. It denotes the Re-creator 
{kar, ker), the second creator, called by Varro with reference 
to Janus Duonus Cerus es, duonus Janus : Thou art the 

1 Virgil, ALn., viii. 201. 
- Ibid., viii. 207—211 : — 

Quatuor a stabilis prastanti corpore tauros 

Avertit, totidem forma superante juvencas. 

Atque hos, ne qua forent pedilms vestigia rectis, 

Cauda in speluncam tractos, versisque viarum 

Indiciis raptos, saxo occultabat opaco. 
3 M. Breal, Hercule et Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, Sancus et 
Caecius, pp. 55, 56 note. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 443 

second creator, the second Janus; that is to to say, he and 
Cacus were two heavenly ploughmen ploughing the year- 
strips, which were metaphorically ploughed by the Indian 
Kuru-Panchala kings at the beginning of this year. Cacus, 
the retrograde plougher of the Pole Star age, ploughed the 
first strip during the six months when the sun went from 
South to North, and Hercules, who met him on the furrow 
as the forward plougher at the turning point of the goal, the 
cave of Cacus, proceeded alone to plough the returning strip 
from the North to the South of the heavenly field. Servius 
tells us that Cacus' sister pointed out to Hercules the path 
her brother had gone x . She was Diana of the South-west 
Aventine hill, whose festival was held on the next day, 
August 13th. She, who was the goddess of the sacred 
groves, especially that of Aricia, had been originally the 
mother-tree-goddess of the mud (tana), who had become 
in the age of lunar-solar time the moon-goddess measuring 
the year. It is also clear from this story that the original 
contest between Hercules and Cacus was at the summer 
solstice, when the sun begins its returning course, and when 
Indra, the rain-god of the original story, killed Ahi-shuva, 
the god of drought, who became the Greek oracular snake 
Pytho at the summer solstice when the rains began in North 
India. 

That the sacrifice offered at the Ara Maxima to celebrate 
this victory was a national ceremony of the ploughing wor- 
shippers of the sun is proved by the rule that only free men 
were allowed to take part in it. This rule is precisely the 
same as that laid down by the Raj Gonds of Chuttisghur, 
sons of the god Ra, who only allow free males, members 
of the tribe, to join in the sacrifice to their supreme god, Sek 
Nag, who, as the snake of rain, is the Gond equivalent of the 
Vedic Ahi-shuva. Those present at the ceremony attended 
it with bare heads crowned with laurels sacred to the sun- 
god ; and similarly all Gonds when sacrificing to Sek Nag 

1 M. Breal, Hercule ct Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, Sancu et 
Cascius, pp. 59 — 61. 



444 History and Chronology 

must be naked. Also the rule excluding women from the 
ceremony conclusively proves it to be later than the rites 
of the Pole Star and Lunar Solar ages, at which both men 
and women assisted ; and if any sex was excluded from any 
of the national ceremonies it was the men, who left the 
solemnisation of the New Year's Feast of the Pleiades 
year, the Thesmophoria, to the women, the only recognised 
parents of the village races. 

The sacrifice was followed by a feast on the flesh of the 
animals sacrificed, in which all present joined ; but of the two 
priestly families who with the Praetor presided at it only 
the Potitii could eat everything offered ; the Pinarii were not 
allowed to eat the entrails ; and this prohibition, together 
with the custom of dividing the officiating Salii into two 
parties, seems to show that it indicated a union between 
two tribes hitherto opposed to one another. 

Another proof of the alliance is derived from the tithes of 
the booty given by Hercules. This shows that the union was 
one between allies among whom each kept the produce of its 
own lands, and only devoted a part to the public benefit, 
instead of placing the whole in the common granaries 
according to the custom of the first village communities. 
Under this new arrangement each family maintained itself 
on the lands which had become its hereditary property. 
A modified form of the old common meals was maintained 
in the sacrificial feasts provided from the tithes, such as that 
at which Samuel entertained Saul. 

The whole ceremony tells of the formation of a new stock 
born from the joined Southern and Northern races, the 
Hindu and Jewish Kathi, similar to that formed by the 
union with the previous population of the Gonds, who 
brought from Asia Minor to India millets, sesame oil, and 
the art of building houses, an alliance producing the con- 
federacy of the Vid-arba or double-four, the eight tribes 
of the Gonds. 

The consummation of this alliance between the ploughing 
immigrants and their predecessors was celebrated at the 



of the Myth- Making Age. 445 

banquet of Hercules by draughts from the loving cup, the 
immense wooden goblet given by the conquering god, that 
of the united Ribhus, indicating, not the division of the 
year into seasons, but the union of its compotent parts into 
the complete year of the circling sun-god. 

The antiquity of the ritual of the Ara Maxima consecrated 
to this new ploughing sun-god is proved by its situation in 
the open air, like the primitive Hindu Greek and Phoenician 
altars, and by its use as the place where the most sacred 
contracts were made by men with bare heads, and the 
flint knife in their hand. It was to Roman ritual the great 
white stone of the Scandinavians on which the most solemn 
oaths were sworn 1 . 

The characteristics of the festival of the 13th of August 
following that of the day of the victorious battle of Hercules, 
completely confirms these conclusions. It was a festival of 
the South-west Aventine, in the temples of Diana and 
Vertumnus, the turning (verto) gods of the year, on that 
hill, and also of Hercules at the Porta Trigemina. It was 
a feast of the Plebs and slaves, not of the aristocratic 
worshippers at the Ara Maxima, and indicated the earliest 
stage of those national autumnal rejoicings at the end of the 
first six months of the year, that of the days when the ruling 
year-god was not the male sun-god, but the sun-maiden, the 
doe brought by the Ashvins or Twins, whose feast was held 
on this day in the Flaminia lucus. to wed the deer-sun-god 
of the North, the plougher Vertumnus, who turned the 
direction of his furrow when the feast was first instituted at 
the summer solstice. The temple was especially dedicated 
to Diana the protectress of deer, the doe-goddess of Orion's 
year. The festival of Flora, the goddess of flowers, was also 
held on this day at the Circus Maximus 2 . But I will deal 
with this festival and its historical meaning presently, when 

1 M. Breal, Hercule et Cacus, chap, ii., La Legende Latine, Sancus et 
Cfficius, pp. 44 — 48. 

- W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Scxtilis, August 13th, 
pp. 198 — 202. 



446 History and Chronology 

I have completed the survey of the Roman Festivals of 
August. 

The next of these festivals to be reviewed are those of 
the Portunalia on the 17th of August, the Vinalia on the 
19th, and the Consualia on the 21st. They all seem to be 
festivals of a race who came into Italy before the sun-worship- 
pers of the eight-days week, and whose gods were those of 
the retrograde year of Cacus. The Portunalia, called also 
Tiberinalia, was the festival of the river-god, the father and 
mother Tiber, and he, as Portunus, was a god who presided 
at the opening of the year, for according to Verrius he had 
a key in his hand, and on this day Janus was worshipped 
at the Theatrum Marcelli. He was apparently the Etruscan 
god Portumnus, who has been identified by Signors Correra 
and Milani with the Greek god Palaemon, called both 
Portunus and Palaemon in Southern Italy, his mother being 
named Mater Matuta, Eileitheia and Leukothea, as well as 
Ino J . Ino was wife of Atha % mus Tammuz or Dumu-zi 
Orion. Of her two sons, Learchus and Melicertes, Learchus 
was killed by his father as the offered victim of his madness, 
answering to the madness of Kalmashapada or Pausya 
recorded in Chapter VI. Ino escaped with her son 
Melicertes as Arusha, the mother of Aurva, the thigh (ftru) 
born god, fled from the slaughterers of her people. Ino 
threw herself with her son into the sea from the Molurian 
rock in Megara, and Melicertes was saved by a dolphin, and 
changed into Palaimon, the god who was landed as the son 
of the mother-fish on the Isthmus of Corinth, where he was 
found under a pine-tree 2 . 

This god Melicertes is the Phoenician Melquarth, the lord 
(malik) of cities (kart/i), worshipped as the sun-god in all 
Phoenician towns. His festival was held at Tyre on the 
2nd of Peritius, the 25th of December, and his death as 

1 Milani, Studi e Materiali di Archeologia e Numismatica, Part i., Correra, 
Sul Culto di Leucothea a Napoli, pp. 73 — 79 ; Milani, Ino Leucothea Imagine 
dell' Acque e dell' Aria, pp. 80 — 86. 

2 Frazer, Pausanias, i. 44, 10, ii. 1, 3, vol. i. pp. 68, 71, 



of the Myth-Making Age. 447 

a log, the yule log, and his resurrection were celebrated in 
the annual festival then begun. He was recalled to life by 
Iolaus *, who was, as we have seen in Chapter V. p. 263, 
Baal Iol, charioteer to Baal Makar or Melquarth. He was 
a form of Lakshman, the boundary-god of the story of 
Rama, who kept the sun-god in his right place in the sky 
furrow. It was after the twelve days intervening between 
this and the 5th of January, of which we have seen the 
meaning in Chapter III. pp. 101, 102, that this god awoke 
as the first representative of the sun-god, in the form of 
Palaimon or Baal Yam, the sea {yam) god, the counterpart 
of the first birth of the Akkadian Salli-manu, the fish-sun- 
god, the Hebrew Solomon, born under a pine-tree on the 
6th of January 2 . 

He was thus the sun-god of the year of the twins Learchus 
and Melquarth, the stars Gemini of the age when the sun 
was in Gemini, in December — January, about 12,200 B.C., 
and in the progress of time he became god of the year 
when the sun was in Gemini, in January — February and 
February — March, that is from 12,200 to about 8000 B.C., 
the present age. It was to him as the god whose year began 
on St. Valentine's day, the 14th of February, with the 
Roman festival of the Parentalia on the 15th, that his mid- 
year festival took place on the 17th of August. In his first 
birth as year-god of the year beginning in January — February 
he is the god in whose honour the Isthmian games of Corinth 
were held. They, as we learn from Thucydides, took place 
in the early spring, for he tells us it was immediately after 
these games that the Spartan fleet under Alkimenes, which 
had been waiting for spring weather, sailed from Kenchreas 
to Chios to attack the Athenians 3. The prize of the Victor 
in these games was a wreath of pine leaves of the tree under 
which the infant god was found. 

The Vinalia festival of the 19th of August was the mid- 

1 Berard, Origine desfCidles Arcadiens, iv., Le Dieu Fils des Phoeniciens, 
p. 254. 2 Ibid. 

3 Thucydides viii. 6 — 10. 



448 History and Chronology 

year festival of the Vine-god Dionysos, whose year began 
with the Anthesteria of the beginning of Anthesterion (Feb- 
ruary—March). The Consualia held on the Aventine on 
the 2 1st of August was, as Tertullian tells us, held in a 
subterranean temple. The god worshipped was the guardian 
of the stored (condere) grain, and at it horses and asses had, 
according to Plutarch, a holiday, and were decked with 
flowers. This is the sun-god, the equivalent of the Celtic sea- 
god Llyr, who had, as we have seen, p. 63, an underground 
temple under the Soar at Leicester, and thus the male form 
of the Southern mother-goddess Bahu, who had become 
the dolphin-mother who brought Palaimon or Baal Yam 
to land. This mid-year festival of Consus was also con- 
nected with the Opiconsivia held at the Regia at the hearth 
of the Vestal Virgins on the 25th of August, or three days 
after the Consualia. It was probably a festival of the 
blessing of the fires at the half-year. 

The whole meaning of these August mid-year festivals 
is set forth in the ceremony of opening on the 24th of 
August the Mundus or round pit on the Palatine in the 
centre of the city. This was sacred to Dis and Proserpine, 
the two goddesses of the year divided into two seasons of six 
months each, the pit by which they were supposed to reach 
the lower world of the South. It was usually closed by 
a lapis manalis, a stone of fate. This was taken off for 
three days at the turning of the year, when the sun having 
reversed its course reached the brink of the Southern pit. 

For a full understanding of this system of half-yearly 
festivals, which seems to have formed part of the ritual 
of this year of eight-day weeks, we must turn to the history 
of the Celtic sun-god Lug. He was, as we have seen, the 
son of Mackinealy, that is of the Wolf's Head. He was 
thus the Celtic form of the Lycean Apollo, the son of the 
wolf of light {lakos lux). He was also the successor of 

1 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis* Sextilis, pp. 202, 207, 
211 — 214. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 449 

Nuada of the Silver-Hand, god of the cycle-year of the lunar 
crescents, who was killed by Balor, the Pole Star father 
of Lug's mother, with an eye before and behind his head. 
Balor in his turn was killed by Lug, who was on his victory 
made king of the Tuatha De Danann x . Lug's year of rule 
must have begun in January — February, for his mid-year 
festival in honour of his nurse Taill-tiu, the goddess of 
flowers, began on the 15th of July and continued till the 
14th of August, the middle-day of the feast being the 
1st of August, our Lammas 2 . Hence his year is the same 
as the Magh year of Bhishma and of Hindu Mundas and 
Ooraons, and its mid-year festival is paralleled by the great 
Kurum festival of India held by the Ooraons and Mundas 
on the bright half of Shravana (July — August), correspond- 
ing with the Hindu Naga Panchami festival of the five 
(panch) Naga snake-mothers held on the 5th of Shravana. 
This festival is followed by the harvest festival of the gora 
or upland rice, which takes place about the middle of 
August. The Kurum festival, like that of the birthday 
of Krishna, takes place at various dates, owing, as I have 
shown, to tribal astronomical reasons for changing the New 
Year's Day. Among the Kharwars of Shahabad it begins 
in the early part of Bhadon (August — September), and lasts 
for fifteen days, and the Bhumijes of Bankura celebrate it 
in the dark and not the light half of Bhadon 3. 

This most significant festival is held in honour of the 
Kurum-tree {Nauclea parvifolia), a wild almond-tree answer- 
ing to the almond-tree at Luz and the almond-rod of Aaron. 
The tree sacred to this festival is cut in the forest by youths 
and maidens who fast till they have completed their task, 
and is brought in solemnly with dances and planted in 
the middle of the Akra or dancing-ground. On the chief 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. vi., pp. 611, 612. 

* Ibid., Lect. v. p. 414. 

3 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Bhumij, p. 125, Ho, p. 329, 
vol. ii., Ooraon, pp. 145, 146; Crooke, Popular Religion and Folklore of 
Northern India, pp. 245, 246. 

G gf 



450 History and Chronology 

night of the festival, before the dance round the Kurum-tree 
begins, the daughters of the head-man of the village bring 
into the Akra young plants of barley which they have grown 
in special beds like the pots of the gardens of Adonis. The 
seed has been sown in sand from the mother-river mixed 
with turmeric, the holy plant of the yellow race. When 
they bring the yellow shoots thus grown into the Akra, they 
first worship the Kurum-tree and lay some of the plants 
before it ; they then distribute the remainder among the 
dancers, who wear them on their heads during the dance, 
which lasts all night. 

A very remarkable piece of national history is told in 
connection with the change from the worship of the Kurum- 
tree of Magh (January — February), in which the birth of the 
barley-sun-god is celebrated, to that of the next god ruling 
the month of Phalgun (February — March), the second month 
of the wedding of Suria or Sukonya to Soma, the month 
sacred to the Pandava Arjuna. 

The sacred river of the Kharwars, the parent-tribe of the 
Cheroos, rulers of Maghada, is the Kurumnasa, which divides 
the province of Maghada or Behar from that of Benares. 
Its name means the destruction [iiasd) of the Kurum-tree, 
and its historical significance is shown by the horror with 
which it is looked on by all orthodox Hindus. None of 
them will touch the water or wet their feet in it, and hence 
at the fords or roads crossing the river, before the present 
bridge over the Grand Trunk Road was built, the Kharwars 
and other dwellers on its banks who looked on it as sacred 
used to make a great deal of money by carrying pilgrims 
across it. The ritual which superseded that of the Magna 
Kurum and removed the river from the list of holy streams 
was that of the Pandavas, the ancestors of the more distinctly 
Northern or fair {panda) Hindus, who began their year not 
with the Magh festival but with that called the Huli, begin- 
ning in the bright half of Phalgun (February— March) and 
ending on the full-moon day. This festival is the Hindu 
parallel of the European carnival beginning originally, before 



of the Myth-Making Age. 45 1 

it varied with Lent, on the 14th of February, St. Valentine's 
Day ; and at the Huli the Hindu women throw red powder 
at their lovers as confetti are thrown at the Carnival. 
It marks in Hindu history the victory of the Pandavas over 
the Kauravyas, who measured time by the eleven-months 
year. 

This great national birthday of February — March is 
commemorated in Hebrew history by the festival of Purim, 
which plays the same part in the Jewish national story as 
that of the Huli does in that of the Hindus. Both celebrate 
the victory of the men of the red race over the yellow sons 
of the almond-tree. The Purim victory is that of Mordecai, 
the god Marduk, the bull-calf of Babylon, and Esther, or 
Istar, the morning-star, over Haman and his ten sons, the 
gods of the eleven-months year, who were slain, as we have 
seen in Chapter VI. p. 303. This was the final victory of Mar- 
duk, or Merodach, over Tiamut and her eleven-fold offspring. 
It is held on the 14th and 15th of Adar (February — March), 
that is to say, at the full and not the new moon of the 
month, and it, like the Roman New Year's Day of the 1st 
of March, tells of an age still later than that which began 
the year with the 14th of February, when the sun entered 
Gemini on that date, about 8200 B.C. At the beginning 
of this epoch the old reckoning by new moons was that 
used, but this was followed by the substitution of full 
moons for the crescent moons, as we see in the Mahabha- 
rata, that Bhishma's year began with the new moon of 
Magh (January — February), and that of Parikshit the sun- 
god succeeding Bhishma with the full moon of Cheit 
(March — April), when he began to run his year's race, fol- 
lowed and guided by Arjuna of Phalgun, the Marduk of 
Esther's story, the young bull-god driving the white sun- 
horses of the sun of February — March. 

We must now return to Lug and the year beginning in 
January — February, the year of the Greek month Gamelion, 
the month of the marriage of Zeus and Here, and origin- 
ally that of Esther and the sun-king of Shushan. The 

G e 2 



452 History and Chronology 

Greek mid-year festival of this year is the Panathenaia of 
Athens held every fifth year in the last days of Hekatom- 
baion (July — August). Its great day was the 28th of the 
month, answering to the 13th of August, the festival of the 
goddess Flora and of Diana of the Aventine at Rome, and 
exactly coinciding with the second stage of the Lug festival 
of July — August. 

But before closing the account of the parallelisms con- 
nected with the year of Lug, I must turn to another account 
of the birth of a sun-god, the equivalent of Lug and the 
Lycian Apollo. In Franche Comte, near the great French 
shrine of Lug at Lug-dunum or Lyons, the Yule-log, called 
La Tronche, was almost in every house in the province, about 
thirty or forty years ago, taken off the fire on Christmas Eve 
almost as soon as it had been placed on it. When it had thus 
been baptized with fire it was taken apart and covered 
with a cloth. Then the childen came in and 'beat it with 
sticks to make it bring forth {pour la /aire accoucher). 
Nothing came of this first beating, so they were removed 
to repent of those sins of the past year which prevented 
the mother from being good to them. After a time they 
were brought back, and when the cloth was removed after 
they beat it their Christmas presents were disclosed I . 

Here we see an unmistakeable survival of the birth of 
Melquarth or Archal, the sun-god, from the funeral pyre 
on the 2nd of Peritius, or the 25th of December, of Apollo 
from Leto, worshipped as a tree-trunk, and Krishna from 
the mother-tree, the black virgin Mari-amma. She is the 
Czech goddess Leto, who, as a doll made of straw, the 
withered sun-mother of corn, is clothed every year in summer 
with a shirt, and she and the broom and the scythe she bears 
in her hands are thrown into the next village 2 . This god- 
dess-mother of the tree-trunk was the Yule-log lit on the 
New Year's festival in the national palace of the bee-taught 



C. Beauquier, Les Mors en Franche Comte, p. 137. 

Mannhardt, Antike Wald und Feld Kultur, vol. i. chap. iii. pp. 155, 156. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 453 

race, for the bees are called to in their hives every Christmas 
Eve in Franche Comte. 

But besides the tree-trunk-mother who gives the year 
gifts, there is, in some parts of Franche Comte, another 
called Tante Arie, who comes riding on an ass and places 
the presents on the Christmas pine-tree, the mother-tree 
of Germany, and this mother is Su-koniya, the year-mother 
of the ass-riding Ashvins 1 . 

Another most remarkable survival of ancient year my- 
thology is found in the drama of La Creche, or the cradle, 
which begins at Besancon in December and lasts at intervals 
till the end of January, so that it is a theatrical represen- 
tation of the opening of the year in December — January 
and January — February. 

The three actors in the drama are those who are in 
Germany the Three Kings of Cologne, headed by the black 
king Melchior, who came to worship the young child on 
the 6th of January. But in Franche Comte they are the 
old wine-grower Batbizier, his wife Naitoure, whom he con- 
stantly beats, and Verly, who tries to keep the peace between 
them 2 . In these three persons we see unmistakeable sur- 
vivals of Rama, Sita and Lakshman, for in their journey to 
find the young sun-god in his cradle in the plough-furrow 
of the year-stars, they go and ask counsel of the old hermit 
or astrologer, the stars of the Great Bear with its guiding 
pointers, who will show the star under which the child is to 
be found. The story tells how Rama, the god who ploughs 
his year-path through heaven in the furrow Sita, whom he 
drives before him, finds Sita as the year-child of the crescent 
moon in the labyrinthine Southern castle of the ten-headed 
Ravana in Lanka (Ceylon), after reaching his journey's end 
by the road in which he has been kept by Lakshman, the 
guardian of the boundary stars of the zodiac in which 
the sun-god is born, and through which he passes in his 
yearly circuit. The star sought for in the cradle-drama is 

1 C. Beauquier, Les Mois en Franche Comte, pp. 136 — 13S. 

2 Ibid., pp. 149—152. 



454 History and Chronology 

that in which the sun-child of Naitoure, the bearing (iiaitre) 
mother, is to be born as the Etruscan Tages was born, from 
the furrow. It is a perpetually recurring drama of the 
history of time told by the passage of the sun through the 
Zodiacal stars, and the successive changes of these stars 
marking the monthly resting-places, and especially those 
of the solstitial and equinoctial guiding points. In this 
year of the eight-days week, though the first birth of the 
young sun-god takes place at the winter solstice, yet the 
second is in January — February, and the mid-year star of 
this second , birth is that in which the sun is found on 
the day of the Assumption of the Virgin on August the 
15th, when Athene receives her year Peplos at the Pana- 
thenaia. This story of the circular year-track of the sun 
followed by Rama, Sita and Lakshman, is also preserved in 
that of the universally known Punch, who beats his wife 
Judy, and is always quarrelling with the policeman, the 
guardian Lakshman. He proves his Indian origin by his 
name, which is that of the Indian five (panch) days week, 
the five Nag-Panchami mothers. The birth-star of this 
cradle drama is that in which the sun was to be found on 
the 6th of January, twelve days after the winter solstice, 
and these twelve days added to the twelve before the 
solstice during which Archal lay on the funeral pyre 
make up twenty-four days or a month of this fifteen-months 
year. 

That this year of Lug which we find depicted in these 
various forms in ancient year-history was a year measured 
by eight-day weeks is proved by the Celtic week of the eight 
Maini. They, as the seven Great Bear stars parents of 
the eighth god, the sun-god of this year, were originally 
the Secht or seven Maini. As the eight Maini they are 
called : 1. Maine Mathremail, M like his mother; 2. Maine 
Athremail, M like his father ; 3. Maine Morgor, M very 
dutiful ; 4. Maine Mingor, M little dutiful ; 5. Maine mo 
Epert, M greater than is said ; 6. Maine Milscothach, M of 
honey-bloom ; 7. Maine Andoe (meaning unknown) ; 8. Maine 



of the Myth-Making Age. 455 

cotageib Ule, M that contains them all, that is the sun-god 
the eighth. They are the eight rings dropped every ninth 
night by Odin's ring Draupnir. This week of eight days and 
nine nights is that of Lug's eight warders placed to guard 
him after he became king of the Tuatha de Danann, and the 
eight warders of the court of Arthur, the ploughing-god 
Airem, who divided the year between them, and of whom 
the eighth was the white horse of the sun, Glewlwyd Gavael- 
vaur, Brave Grey with the Great Grip r . 

F. The year of Odusseus as god of the Tliigh. 

In the survey of the sun-gods of the year born of the 
Thigh who rule this year of eight-day weeks, I have now 
to return to a sun-god whom I have mentioned several 
times before. This is Odusseus, the victor, like Arjuha, in 
a shooting contest for the goddess of the year. He was 
originally the Northern wandering-god Orwandil of the 
North, whose great toe was the star Rigel in Orion. He 
was married to Penelope, daughter of Ikarios, whom he won 
in a foot-race as leader of the stars going round the Pole. 
His wife, as weaver of the web (irrjvrj), was originally the 
Pleiades or spinning-mother, but as the daughter of Ikarios, 
who was, as we have seen in Chapter VI. p. 326, changed 
into the constellation Bootes, she became, as the goddess- 
mother of the corn-growing races, the constellation Virgo, 
one of the zodiacal stations of the sun ; and perhaps she was 
also the leader of the three weaving sisters, the Pole Star 
Vega, who was, as Gandhari, a child-bearing mother like 
Penelope. Odusseus was, as we have seen in Chapter IV. 
p. 144, the god of the year-bed of the olive mother-tree- 
goddess Athene, and his connection with the year is further 
shown by the catalogue of his swine kept by his Phoenician 
swineherd Eumaeus. He owned six hundred sows, lodged 
in twelve pig-sties, and he had also six hundred boars who 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1SS6, Lect. iv. pp. 364 — 372, Lect. vi. pp. 
617, 618. 



456 History and Chronology 

lived outside, but whose numbers had been reduced to three 
hundred and sixty by the suitors of Penelope, who killed 
them as food. They were guarded by four dogs, the four 
Lokapala stars Sirius, the Great Bear, Corvus and Argo. 

Their numbers show that they were the year-pigs of the 
twelve-months year of the boar-god, and in this reckoning 
fifty sows were allotted to each month x . These fifty answer 
to the fifty great gods of the Akkadians, and the fifty 
daughters of the Hindu god of time, Daksha 2 , the fifty 
daughters of Endymion by Selene, the moon, the fifty sons 
of Priam, the fifty daughters of Danaus, and the fifty servant- 
wives left behind in Ithaca by Odusseus when he went to 
Troy, of whom twelve had become mistresses to the suitors. 
They were the year-goddesses of old year reckonings, who 
were to be replaced by the newly-recovered Penelope, whose 
hand "he has to win in his contest with the suitors 3. 

These fifty children of the year-god and the fifty mother- 
sows apparently mean fifty days, so that the whole year 
of twelve months would contain six hundred days, and six 
hundred is the number of the Babylonian cycle of the Great 
Ner of 600 years. But if this year of twelve months of 
Nergal, the Great {gal) Ner, contained six hundred days, the 
term day must have a different meaning from that we attach 
to it, and if the Odusseus year of six hundred days equalled 
in length, as it must have done, that of the three hundred 
and sixty boars of the suitors and the year of three hundred 
and sixty days, each day must have been made up of frac- 
tional parts differing from those which make up our day. 

An explanation of this difficulty may be found in the 
Hindu Tithis or lunar days, which differ in length from the 
civil days. In the list of the Tithi days of the lunar month 
given by AlberunI, the eight Vishtis or changes into which 
it is divided contain thirty Tithis or lunar days, and the first 

1 Homer, Odyssey, xiv. 5 — 22. 

2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, Lect. iii. p. 183; Mahabharata Adi 
{Sambhava) Parva, lxvi. p. 189. 

3 Homer, Odyssey, xxii. 419—429. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 457 

of these Vishtis is called Vadavamukha, the distorted month, 
the name of the god of the horse's head of the eleven-months 
year of p. 396 x . But AlberunI does not tell us how this year 
of Tithis is made up apart from their use in the year of the 
Karanas, which, as we have seen, was measured by the same 
days as we use. But we find, perhaps, a clue to the measure- 
ment of this year of Odusseus as Vadavamukha, the god of 
the eleven-months year, in the constantly repeated statement 
that he returned after his wanderings to Ithaca, and resumed 
his power in the twentieth year since his departure, when his 
year-dog Argus, the constellation Argo, fell dead at his feet 
from joy at his return 2 . This number in the account of his 
vagabond career as an unattached sun-god of the lunar-solar 
epoch apparently marks the number of lunar months in his 
year, which was measured, as we shall see presently, by 
twenty-four lunar phases. This year of twenty months, each 
containing thirty, or of twelve months each of fifty, Tithi 
days, would be one of 600 days ; and if every Tithi day 
contained twenty hours equalling our twenty-four, each 
month of thirty days would contain 600 hours instead of 
the 720 of our month, and each year would contain 7,200 
hours instead of the 8,640 hours of the year of three hundred 
and sixty of our days. Such a measurement of time as this 
is quite practical, and it may have been used by the national 
.astronomers who measured in the Southern observatories the 
year of the horse's head framed in the North as the eleven- 
months year. These astronomers of Northern descent, 
before they united with the Southern races and formed our 
mixed decimal and duodecimal system of reckoning, did all 
their reckoning in decimals, and this is the reckoning fol- 
lowed in this year I have sketched above. Our mixed 
system is based on the Dravidian duodecimal measurement 
of time, which divides the day into sixty Ghatis or hours 
of twenty-four minutes each, an order reversed by the Baby- 

' Sachau, Alberunl's India, vol. ii. chap, lxviii. pp. 201 — 203 ; Mahabharata 
Adi (Chailra-ratha) Parva, clxxxii. p. 517. 
2 Homer, Odyssey, xvii. 327. 



458 History and Chronology 

lonians, from whom we took our calendar. As the Dravidian 
system provided a most elaborate division of time into 
seconds and more minute fractions, it was much more useful 
for astronomers than the rougher calendar of the North ; 
hence the latter was superseded for practical use, and only- 
survived in such historical tales of old Northern life as the 
original story of Odusseus Orwandil. 

The correctness of this hypothesis has no bearing what- 
ever on the main argument of this explanation of the Odus- 
seus story, for which it is only necessary to prove him to 
be a year-god of the primaeval methods of reckoning time. 
The twelve pigsties for his sows and the three hundred 
and sixty boars left alive prove this, and further complete 
proof that he was a god of the Thigh year is given by the 
mark on his thigh by the gash made by the boar of Par- 
nassus which he slew while hunting with the sons of Auto- 
lycus, the self {auto) shining {lukos) god, the independent 
sun-god of that mountain sacred to Bellerophon or Baal 
Raphon, the sun-physician, and his horse Pegasus, who made 
the fountain Hippocrene at its foot. This wound was above 
his knee (yovvbs vTrep), and immediately after receiving it 
Odusseus struck the boar on the right shoulder and slew 
it I . The poet's description of the fight is thrillingly graphic. 
The boar charged past Odusseus from his left side, and as 
he passed gashed with his tusk the spearman's left thigh, 
which was in advance of his right leg. He kept straight 
on his course after delivering his stroke, and Odusseus struck 
him on the right shoulder as he went by him. The spear 
went home, and the fighting monarch of the forest fell in the 
dust with the dying grunt of defiance (eirecrev iv tcovtrjat, 
fiaKODv), with which he told his foe that he would die fighting 
to the last. This story is one which could only have been 
told by a poet who had hunted and slain the undaunted 
king of the forest who dies fighting to his last gasp. 

This mark imprinted on his thigh before he left Ithaca 

1 Homer, Odyssey, xix. 449 — 453. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 459 

on his twenty years of wandering was one by which he 
was known to all his friends, and in his insistence on this 
point the poet practically tells us that he was looked on 
as the god whose left thigh was torn. It was by this mark 
that his nurse Eurykleia, also called Euronyme, recognised 
him as she washed his feet, and she was the Phoenician 
Astro Noema, the star Virgo, guardian of the sun-god of the 
eleven-months year I . It was by this that he made himself 
known to Eumaios the swineherd and Philoitios the herds- 
man of the oxen, who apparently represents Aryaman, 
the sun-physician, in his first form of Arcturus, the chief 
star in Bootes, the guardian constellation of the ox (fiovs) 2 . 
They were his two chief assistants in his contest with the 
suitors. It was also by this sign that he revealed himself 
to his father Laertes 3. Thus as the god with the wounded 
and withered left thigh, he was the parallel of Jacob, who 
had, as we have seen, his left thigh withered in his contest 
with the god whom he conquered, as Odusseus conquered 
the boar-sun-god 4. 

The final battle of Odusseus with the suitors is an exact 
parallel with that fought by Arjuna with the wooers of 
Drupadl. The rules of the contest were that the victor 
should bend and string the bow of Eurytus, given by his 
son Iphitus to Odusseus, and shoot an arrow right through 
the twelve double axes (7reA,e/eu?) or twenty-four crescent- 
moons of the twelve months of the year of the twelve 
pigsties 5. Whoever should succeed in performing this feat, 
requiring the supernatural strength and skill of the supreme 
god, should become the husband of Penelope. Odusseus 
alone was able to bend the bow and shoot the arrow through 
the lunar crescents 6 , and his bow was the self-same bow 
as that with which Arjuna won Drupadl, for Arjuna's bow 
was that of Krishanu, the rainbow-god, drawer (harsh) of the 
bow, and Krishanu's name is exactly translated by that 

1 Homer, Odyssey, xix. 38S — 393, xx. 5. - Ibid., xxi. 216 — 220. 

3 Ibid., xxiv. 330 — 332. 4 Gen. xxxii. 2S. 

5 Homer, Odyssey, xxi. 10—32, 68 — 76. " Ibid., xxi. 404 — 423. 



460 History and Chronology 

of Eurytus or Eurutos, the drawer (epveo). The difference 
between the mark aimed at in the two contests is most 
noticeable. Arjuna aimed at the Pole Star bird encircled 
by the guardian constellation Draco, while the arrow of 
Odusseus was shot through the twelve double axes, the 
stations of the twelve zodiacal stars, which were twenty- 
seven in the furrow of Rama, and became twelve in our 
zodiac. In these the sun rests while the twenty-four lunar 
crescents mark his monthly stay in each star. 

The fight with and slaughter of the suitors which suc- 
ceeded the victory of Odusseus was preceded by the capture 
of Melanthios, the goatherd, the Pole Star goat who went 
to get arms for the suitors from the bedchamber of Odusseus, 
containing the heaven's bed. He was caught in the act 
of robbing the treasury of heaven and bound, thus succumb- 
ing to Philoitios as the star Aryaman, the cattle herdsman. 
Melanthios had been cup-bearer to the suitors, the filler 
of the cups of the seasons, and had always derided Odusseus 
when he returned from his wanderings disguised as a beggar- 
man, the despised sun-god, who was only recognised by his 
faithful dog Argus, the constellation Argo, who died to 
make way for the new year ruler x . The doors of the central 
hall of the heaven's palace were closed by Eurycleia and 
Philoitios, the two guardian-stars Virgo and Arcturus 2 ; and 
Odusseus then slew all the imprisoned suitors, the false gods 
of the ages of the worship of the gods of night, those buried 
by Jacob under the oak tree at Bethel. At the end of the 
slaughter Melanthios, the goat-god, was brought out, his 
nose, ears, hands and feet were cut off, and he was emascu- 
lated, that is changed from the ape-god of the Thigh to 
be a sexless gnomon-pillar 3. 

The sun-god went after his victory to visit his father 
Laertes, the gardener of the Garden of God of the Zendavesta. 
In this he had dwelt with his wife Antikleia, the backward 
(anti) key, the year-goddess of the retrograde Pole Star 

1 Homer, Odyssey, xvii. 212 — 216, 300—327, 369 ff., xx. 172 — 184, 255. 

2 Ibid., xxi. 376— 391. ^ ibid., xxii. 135 — 193, 474—477. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 461 

years wedded to the gnomon tree-trunk, the Indian Lat, the 
vernacular name for the Sanskrit Yupa, the sacrificial stake, 
the- Etruscan Larth, or eldest son, the Pelasgian Lar, or na- 
tional father. He was the Greek form of the Roman Latinus, 
the father of the Latins, son of Faun us, the deer-sun-god, 
and Marica, the sea or marsh-mother of the tree-ape, the 
Hindu Maroti, the Latin Mars Mart-is. He was the god 
of the sacrificial stakes which first marked the seasons, and 
became those denoting the months. These Lats surrounded 
the Hindu Temples, built on the plans of this age, such as 
that at Sando-paya in Burmah, where the central temple is 
encircled by Chaityas or shrines, between which are posts, 
with the Garuda eagle cloud-bird of Vishnu on the top. 
These Chaityas and Garuda posts are said in the Mahabharata 
to have been erected by Bhishma, the god of this year, round 
all Indian temples, and their meaning as calendrical signs 
is shown by the thirty stone pillars surrounding the sun-circle 
at Stonehenge, denoting the thirty days of the month *. 

Thus Odusseus as the conquering god of the right thigh 
•is the son of the fruit-bearing tree-pillar, the earthly emblem 
of the creating fire-drill which begot the sun-god as the 
sun of the nut-tree. This nut-tree, the fruit of which was 
scattered before the bridal pair at Roman weddings, is 
believed by the Jews to have been planted in the Garden of 
Eden. It became the almond-tree of the Indian Ooraons and 
Kharwars, and the sacred walnut-tree of the Italian witches. 
This holy tree grew at Beneventum, and the son of one of 
the peasants who sold its fruit was one day gathering them. 
As he opened the fruits to eat their contents a fairy came 
out of each, and they surrounded him and danced with him, 
as the stars danced round the beggar sun-god Odusseus. 
When the dance was over they gave him three nuts, told 
him to open two, to keep the third for the king's daughter, 

1 Simpson, ' The Pillars of the Thiiparama and Lankarama Dagabas in 
Ceylon.' J.R.A.S., 1896, p. 361; Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, cix. 
13, 14, p. 327; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay viii., 
pp. 138 ff. 



462 History and Chronology 

and to take a basketful of nuts, which they gave him, to the 
king. From the first of his three nuts there issued so much 
gold as to make him the richest man in the world, and from 
the second a splendid summer suit of clothes. He then went 
to the king and asked for the hand of his daughter, but 
was refused, as her father said she was promised to another 
husband, the moon-god. But he was allowed to give the 
third nut to the princess, telling her not to open it till she 
went to bed, and then he himself came out of it, and remained 
with her as her secretly wedded husband. But the Indian 
custom of the Swayamvara, or self-choice of the year-bride, 
had penetrated to the Italy of this age, and when the day 
came when the princess had, like Drupadi and Penelope, to 
choose her mate among contending suitors summoned by the 
king, she chose the youth of the walnut-tree, who had 
resumed his peasant's garb. In contending with the suitors 
who exclaimed against her choice, the beggar-sun-god, like 
Arjuria and Odusseus, vanquished all competitors, and be- 
came the father of the sun-god born of the walnut-tree x . 

We see in this story a resume of the numerous variant 
forms of the historical tale told in this Chapter, and trace 
it with its Indian original features to Italy. We also see 
how the walnut-tree-trunk became, through its fruit, the 
mother of the sun-god raised from earth to heaven. This is 
the tree-trunk which was beaten as the lying-in mother in 
Franche Comte, that is ploughed and stricken like the 
laboured earth to make it yield its fruits, and we find in 
this series of symbols the historical origin of the old rhyme, 

"A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, 
The more you beat them the better they'll be." 



G. The year of the birth of the Buddha and Parikshit 
as sun-gods. 

I have now in this survey of the history of the sun-god 
of the year of eight-day weeks the sun-physician to deal 

1 Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 193, 194. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 463 

with, the most graphic of all the birth-stories of this god, 
the Buddha, the Indian sun-god, who was, as we have seen 
in Chapter II. p. 31, born of the Sal-tree. His mother 
Maya, a form of Magna, the goddess ruling this year, was 
otherwise Marichi or Tara, the Thibetan Pole Star goddess 
driving the Great Bear constellation of the seven pigs. 
But this god, who was, as we shall see, born as the sun- 
physician, according to the original tradition in Magna 
(January — February), was in the orthodox account of his 
birth born at the vernal equinox. That is to say he was 
in the third of his births born when the sun entered Gemini 
at the vernal equinox, about 6200 B.C., after he had entered 
the Tusita heaven of wealth in his Vessantara birth, when 
the sun was in Gemini, in February — March, about 8200 B.C., 
and the Yamaloka heaven of the Twin ( Yamd) gods in his 
Mah-osadha birth as the great medicine (Osadha) god 
when the sun was x in Gemini, in January — February, about 
10,200 B.C. 

In his history, as told in the Nidanakatha, he was in his 
earliest existence as the first of the twenty-seven Buddhas, 
the twenty-seven days of the month of the .cycle-year who 
preceded him, Dipankara meaning the nascent light, the 
birth-star Aries, the first of the twenty-seven Nakshatra stars, 
the sun-god born in Aries, at the autumnal equinox, in the 
city of Ram-ma, the mother of the ploughing-god Ram, who 
follows the furrow Sita round the heavens 2 . In short he was 
the sun-god beginning the three-years cycle. 

The successor of this sun-god born at the autumnal equinox 
was the god conceived at the summer solstice, after ten lunar 
months of gestation. And it is the 'story of this conception 
at the summer solstice which is told in the Nidanakatha. 
His mother Maya was then borne in spirit to the Great 
Sal-tree of the Himalayas standing in the Mano-Sila-tal 
plain (tal) of the rock (sila) of calculation (mano), the world's 

1 Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories : The Nidanakatha, Birth of the 
Buddha, pp. 67, 7S. 

2 Ibid., Sumedha and Dipankara, pp. 2 fl. 



464 History and Chronology 

gnomon-tree. She was brought thither by the four Lokapala 
angels, the four stars ruling the four quarters of the heavens. 
They bathed her in the Anototta, the " not-heated " lake, the 
cool pool of pure water, whence the mother rivers rise. They 
laid her after her bath with her head to the East, and the 
young sun-god appeared before her as the elephant cloud-god 
Gan-isha, who came from the North-east, and entered her 
right side i . The sun-god thus conceived was born in the 
Sal grove Lumbini, the village grove common to Kapila- 
vastu, the city of Suddho-dana, the pure (suddlid) seed, and 
Koliya the town of Maya, who was of the race of the Mallis. 
This grove Lumbini is the counterpart of Sanket, the place 
of assignation, where Radha. and Nanda, the parents of the 
Bharatas, met. 

The sun-child when born was received by the four Loka- 
pala angels in a net, the star-net of the zodiacal stars. He 
thence stepped out on the antelope skin of the god Krishna, 
the black antelope, and took seven strides under the white 
umbrella held over him by Su-yama, the twins (ydma) 
of Su, the stars Gemini, under which constellation he was 
born. His first birth, according to the Nidanakatha, was 
the Mahosadha birth, followed by the other two births 
named above. All his births, like those of the Jain Tlr- 
thakaras, were accompanied by the same historical phe- 
nomena, and all took place under the guardianship of 
Su-yama, the stars Gemini. 

In his Mahosadha birth as the sun-physician he came 
into the world with a branch of Sandal Chandanasaro wood 
in his hand, that is the tree {sard) of the moon {cliandd) ; 
that is to say he was the sun-god born of the moon-tree, the 
Suria wedded in the Vedic hymn to Soma. He told his 
mother this was medicine, hence he was called Osadha- 
darika, Medicine-child 2 . This medicine-plant was planted 



1 Rhys David, Buddhist Birth Stories : The lYidanakatha, Maha Maya's 
Dream, pp. 62, 63. 

2 Ibid., Birth of the Buddha, pp. 66—68. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 465 

in an earthenware pot, his first begging-bowl, of which we 
shall see the meaning presently. 

His first appearance in public was at the Ploughing 
Festival of Jambu-dwipa. This, as we have seen, took place 
among the Kuru-Panchalas at the beginning of Magh 
(January — February), and it answered to our plough festival, 
commemorated in the name Plough Monday given to the 
first Monday after the Epiphany. It was the ploughing 
of Hercules, the forward plougher, ending with the death 
of Cacus, and still celebrated in the Chinese festival held 
on the first day of the year beginning in January — February, 
when the sun and moon are in the same constellation. The 
Chinese Emperor then ploughs three furrows, each of the 
three dukes or governors of frontier provinces five, and his 
nine other ministers nine each r . At the ploughing of 
Suddho-dana he ploughed two furrows, one forward and the 
other backward, with a golden plough ; and his ministers, 
of whom there were one hundred and seven, nine each. 
Thus the Chinese year is one of three and the Hindu of two 
seasons of five-day weeks commemorated in the Chinese 
ritual, while the nine-days week is recalled in the nine times 
twelve Hindu ploughs and in the nine Chinese ministers and 
the nine ministerial furrows ploughed in both countries. 

The Buddha at this ploughing was seated under the Jambu- 
tree, the central parent-tree of the royal village, which like 
the royal province was the centre point of Jambu-dwipa. 
His shadow is said to have remained stationary as repre- 
senting the central steadfast point, the earthly embodiment 
of the motionless Pole Star 2 . This description of the 
Ploughing Festival is clearly taken from an original birth- 
legend of the Kuru-Panchalas of Central India, brought 
by the Mallis to Kapila-vastu, the shrine of the ancient 
Kapila, their yellow {kapild) divine parent. There apparently 

1 Legge, Li-chT, The Yiieh Ling, First month, 13; S.B.E. , vol. xxvii. pp. 
254, 255. 

2 Rhys Davids, Buddhist Bi}-th Stories : The Nidanakatha, The Ploughing 
Festival, pp. 74, 75. 

h h 



466 History and Chronology 

the individual Siddharta Gotama, the preacher, teacher and 
founder of the great religious organisation the Buddhistic 
Church, was born about 550 B.C. This is the date given 
by the Chinese for the birth of their great moral teacher 
Confucius, and it was this same period that produced the 
Hebrew prophets. These men, who enthusiastically devoted 
themselves to the task of awakening the national conscience, 
were the leaders of a wave of religious aspiration after mental 
and practical perfection which passed over the whole of 
Southern Asia. The awakening spirit of this new revival 
was born from discontent with the metaphysical philosophy 
which had succeeded the formal ritualism in which the early 
faiths ended. The first period of the belief in the Chinese 
Tao or path, the yearly recurring round of the imperishable 
germ of life, had passed away. The Northern sense of 
individuality and desire for personal success had made the 
belief in the Tao, and in its yearly task of silently creating 
life and promoting the physical and moral progress of the 
nations who remained true to the teachings of its ritual, 
become unsatisfying to the intellects of those who wished 
for more activity and less somnolent contentment with the 
present. To these reformers dutiful submission and un- 
questioning obedience were no longer the chief virtues. 
Hence the nations inspired by them desired as a leader 
a divine son of man who would be followed as an example 
by the soldiers who joined his banner in the war against 
apathy and mental stagnation, and this conception and 
aspiration caused the older belief in the state as a unit 
bound together by strict routine to disappear, and as it faded 
away the older form of history based on abstractions which 
were clear to the initiated but dark to the multitude became 
changed into tales in which the names which had been first 
symbols of the departed dead became living heroes who had 
each lived their lives on earth as men. When the older 
forms of history were thus distorted and their true meanings 
forgotten or disregarded, schools of philosophy arose which 
tried to substitute for traditional history answers to the 



of the Myth-Making Age. 467 

riddles of existence spun from thought. It was on the 
Vedanta and Sankhya systems of philosophy disseminated 
in the teachings of the Indian Upanishads and the similar 
questionings of Chinese metaphysicians that both Confucius 
and Siddharta Gotama founded their systems of ethical 
religion, which simply taught that man's chief task on earth 
was "to make his moral being his prime care." According 
to the teaching of the Indian reformer, he was to dismiss 
from his thoughts all metaphysical speculations as to ulti- 
mate causes as unprofitable and useless, and in the system 
of self-education to which he was to devote himself, he was 
to abandon the ritualism which enjoined the needless and 
sinful offering of living victims, to eschew asceticism and 
valueless mortification of the flesh, and follow the eight-fold 
noble path of (1) Right views, (2) High aims, (3) Right 
speech, (4) Upright conduct, (5) Harmless livelihood, (6) 
Perseverance in well-doing, (7) Intellectual activity, (8) 
Earnest thought. By this discipline men and women were 
to try to reach a stage of existence in which sin was 
impossible, and in which all who had attained to or were 
strenuously striving to reach this state of perfection became 
members of the Sanga or community of the faithful, the 
reunited body who had, while attaining the benefits of 
individual exertion, purged themselves of its temptations. 

It was as the leader in this return to a re-glorified past 
of national righteousness recovered by those received as 
citizens of the village community of the City of God, that 
their teacher was installed by his disciples as the Buddha 
or god -ai knowledge ; and though he was actually born 
as the son of the Headman of the Sakya Gautama village 
of Kapila-vastu, who was probably also a Manki or pro- 
vincial chief of the Sakya clan territory, they also invested 
him with the attributes of the previous national gods of time, 
which described their birth, life and death in the historical 
myths. In doing this they merely, as we have seen in the 
previous chapters of this book, followed the examples of 
their predecessors, who gave the same birth-history to each 

H h 2 



468 History and Chronology 

successive manifester of the changing forms of the god who 
measures time. Consequently in the picture of his life 
handed down to posterity Siddharta Gotama, who was a 
teacher imbued with religious zeal, an ardent desire to 
discover truth and a rare sympathy with the mental difficul- 
ties of others, was born and died as the year-god who passed 
through the ecliptic path of the stars in his yearly round 
of birth, growth, extinction, and re-birth. 

It was as the young sun-god that he took the lead in the 
symbolic ploughing of the New Year. When once started on 
his career his first task was to beget a successor. This young 
sun-god was born as Rahulo, the little sun Rahu, whose 
mother, unnamed in the Nidanakatha, was Bhudda Kaccani, 
the eleventh of the Buddhist Theris, or year-mothers, preceded 
by Gotami Maha Pajapati, the sister of his mother Magha, 
who had brought him up when his mother died seven days 
after his birth. She was the female form of Prajapati Orion, 
and was, as we shall see in Chapter VIII., the goddess 
ruling the first month of the year of thirteen lunar months. 

Rahulo's mother, Bhudda Kaccani, the Golden Saint, or 
Yasodhara, the renowned {yaso) stream (dhara) x , was the 
mother-river of the sons of this goddess of the eleven-months 
year. It was seven days after Rahulo's birth that the 
Buddha started on his career as the historical sun-god, 
whose history is told in a story conceived when the myth 
of the birth and life, the sun-physician, was first made the 
most important chapter in national history telling of the 
revolution in popular theology. 

He left his father's capital on his horse Kanthika, the 
star-horse Pegasus of the year of eleven months, accompanied 
by his groom Channo, the concealed one, the counterpart 
of Lakshman in the story of Rama, the hidden power which 
kept the sun in its right course through the furrow of heaven. 
They took him thirty yojanas through the heavenly circle 
of the thirty stars to the banks of the river called Anoma the 

1 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 155. 



of the MytJi-Makiug Age. 469 

illustrious, consecrated to Anoma-dassin, the sixth Buddha 
to whom the Arjuna-tree (Tenninalia belericd) was sacred. 
This, as we have seen in the story of Nala and DamayantI, 
was the tree of Calculation, which instructed Nala, the year 
god, in the true history of annual time I . 

It was when he reached the epoch of astronomical cal- 
culation that the birth of the sun-god as the sun-physician 
took place. He then began his career as the sun-god of 
the horse's head, and polled his hair, as stated in the 
Nidanakatha, according to the custom recorded in Chapter 
VI. pp. 338 ff. He received from the Archangel Ghati-kara, 
who measured time by the Dravidian method, which divided 
the day into sixty Ghatis of twenty-four minutes each, 
the eight requisites of the beggar sun-god. These were 
the three robes, the leaves, flowers and fruit of the three 
seasons, spring, summer, autumn, and the winter alms-bowl 
of earth, that in which healing plant of the sun-physician 
was planted as a seedling to grow into the year-tree of 
the next year. To these four were added (1) the razor, 
the pruning-knife, which gave to the parent-god of the 
river-born race the firstfruits of the produce grown in the 
year symbolized in the clipped and offered hair ; (2) the 
threading-needle, which united all the days of the year 
together ; and (3) the girdle of the circling sun, which bound 
days, nights, weeks and seasons in the perfect whole. The 
eighth requisite commemorating the eighth day of the week 
was the water-strainer, the clouds which sent to earth the 
rain, the parent of the life disseminated in the earth by 
the sowing-god, the Latin Semo Sancus 2 . 

It was in this mendicant garb that the sun-god of this 
year of the eight-day weeks proceeded to the scene of his 
birth. He began his journey after the death of Kanthika, 
the star-horse Pegasus, who passed into the Tavatimsa 

1 Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories, pp. 79, 82, 85, 40 ; Hewitt, Ruling 
Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay ii., pp. 71 — 82, vol. ii., Essay vii., 
pp. 73, 82. 

- Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidanakatha, pp. S6 — 88. 



470 History and Chronology 

heaven of the thirty-three gods of his eleven-months year 
as a star-angel, the son of god {deva-putto) T . He rested 
on his way under the Pandava rock, the year-rock of the 
year of Bhishma and of the acquisition by the Pandavas 
of the year-mother-tree Drupadi, won by Arjuna's victory 
as the archer-god of this year. 

The final destination of this sun-god about to be born was 
the land of Uruvela, that is of extended (urn) time {vela). 
There the birth village was that called Senani, the clustered 
army {send) of the stars ruled by the Headman, the general 
Senani, the Pole Star god whose daughter was Su-jata, the 
sun-mother born (jata) of the mother-cloud-bird Su or Khu, 
the bird in the nest of the Pole Star. Her tree-mother was 
the Nigrodha tree (Ficus Indicd), the Banyan fig-tree-mother 
of the Kushika and of the Buddha's predecessor, the twenty- 
seventh Buddha Kassapo or Kashyapa. As an offering 
to her tree-mother Su-jata took on May Day the full-moon 
of Vaisakha (April — May), the milk of eight cows selected 
out of the thousand cows of light which fed in her father's 
fields, the Nag-kshatra or fields of the Nag or ploughing 
stars. These eight selected stars were the seven stars of 
the Great Bear, and the eighth the sun-god. To heat this 
milk and make with it rice gruel, the food of the ripened 
seed of life, the rice-mother-plant of the first founders of 
villages, a fire was lit by Sakko, the wet {sak) god, the 
leader of the thirty-three gods of the month in the calendar 
of the eleven-months year. He and the other three Loka- 
pala star-gods and the Pole Star god Brahma, the five stars 
crowning the tree of Bhishma, infused into this rice gruel 
the madhu or honey-sweet wine of the Mahua {Bassia 
latifolid)) the Sap of life of the races born from the 
marriage union with this tree in quantities sufficient "to 
support all the men and angels of the four continents and 
two thousand islands of the world 2 ." In short the food 

1 Fausboll, /utaka, vol. i. p. 85. 

- Ibid., vol. i. p. 68; Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Nidana- 
katha, p. 90. 



PLATE III. 



To face p. 471. 




From a photograph of the cast given by Mr. A. Maudslay to the South 
Kensington Museum. 

The Yucatan God of Copan cum-ahau, Lord of the Bowl, depicted 
as the Indian elephant-hkaded God Gan-isha, Lord of the Land,, 
seated on the double Su-astika. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 471 

offering was the concentrated essence of the divine creative 
force. 

When it was prepared the bird-mother, the May Queen, 
sent her servant Punfia Completion to the Nigrodha tree, 
under which she saw the Buddha sitting as the rising-sun 
born from the tree. She ran back to tell her mistress, who 
on hearing her report placed the oblation to the rising-sun 
of the eight-rayed star in a golden bowl and herself gave 
it to Buddha ; it replaced the earthen bowl of Ghati-kara, 
which then disappeared. 

I must here turn aside from the narrative of the Buddha's 
birth as sun-god of the eight-rayed star to call attention 
to the annexed representation of the Buddha in the act 
of taking this creating bowl, which points to a much earlier 
form of the birth-legend than that which has come down 
to us in the Nidanakatha. This picture appears in one 
of the sculptures of the great Mexican temple at Copan. 
This, as shown in the photograph taken on the spot by 
Mr. Maudsley r , a copy of which is here reproduced, depicts 
the god holding in his right hand the steaming bowl of rice 
not as the man Siddharta Gotama but as the elephant- 
headed cloud-god Gan-isha, and in this portrait his earliest 
form of divine existence as the cloud-bird is also recognised, 
for the bird's tail protrudes from the back of his head. He 
is seated on the two Suastikas, the female Su-astika rf-* 
representing the sun going northward at the winter solstice, 
and the male Su-astika L-f-j denoting the southern path of the 

sun after the summer solstice. These are combined to form 
a square, and within this the sun and rain-god is seated with 

his legs crossed in the form of the St. Andrew's Cross J\, 
the sign of the solstitial sun. The seed-vessel in front of the 
god is also most noteworthy. It answers to the embryo 
plant-god in the bas-relief of Isilikaia standing between the 
seed-bearing-mother and her son, the god with the double- 

1 Godman and Salvia, Blologia Ccntrale Americana ; Maudsley, Arc/icco/o^y, 
Copan, Part I., Plate 9. 



47 2 History and Chronology 

axe, answering to the Etruscan god Sethlans, p. 259. The 
embryo seed-vessel of this illustration represents the cloud- 
god Gan-isha ready, as a seed made fertile by the rain, to 
enter the womb of his mother, the mother-tree. And that 
Gan-isha is the rain-god, is proved by the trunk whence 
the elephant emits the water he has drawn up with it to 
wash himself. In this illustration the water is spouting 
from the trunk on to the three balls, the three apples of the 
year of life of the three seasons, to fertilise them as the 
heaven-sent rain. 

To return to the birth-story of the sun-god, when he had 
received the sun-bowl of the Sap of life he rose from his seat 
and went sunwise round the Nigrodha tree, with the vessel 
in his hand, to the banks of the river called Nlranjara. This 
is the water {nircrni) of age {jam) or the Phalgu, the river 
of February — March, in which he was to begin his year. 
It was the river of the ecliptic stream of time in which, 
as is said in the Nidanakatha, so many thousand previous 
Buddhas had begun their year's reign as sun-gods. He 
entered the river at the Supathita or firmly-established ferry, 
the Star into which the sun was to enter on his New Year's 
Day. Having bathed he sat down with his face to the East, 
whence he was to rise, and divided the rice into forty-nine 
portions, which he ate as the food which was to support him, 
the god born in his Vessantara birth at the vernal equinox 
on the 20th of March,, for forty-nine days, till he rose on the 
fiftieth day, the 10th of May, as the newly-born emancipated 
sun-god, whose birth-history is told in the Nidanakatha. 
These forty-nine food portions answer to the forty-nine 
oblations offered after the sun-horse of the Ashva-medha 
sacrifice, the horse who takes the sun-god round the heavens 
on his annual course, had been started on his year-race, 
and after the national history told at this yearly spring 
festival of the New Year had been recited J . 



1 Eggeling, Sal. Brah., xiii. I, 2, 1, xiii. 1, 3, 5, xiii. 4, 3, 2, 4; S.B.E., 
Yol. xliv. pp. 276, 2S2, notes I, 2, 361, 363. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 473 

When the rising-sun-god had eaten this meal he threw his 
golden bowl into the river, which bore it to the realm of the 
Kala Naga Raja, the snake-god of time, and took its place 
as the lowest of the bowls of the three previous year-gods of 
epochs, the gods of the three Buddhist heavens of the Sha- 
tum (hundred) Maharajaka Devaloko, the Tavatimsa heaven 
of the thirty-three gods ruled by Sakko and the Yama- 
devaloko, when the year was ruled by the sun after its 
entrance into the twin ( Yd ma) constellation Gemini at 
his first birth in Magh (January — February) as the sun- 
physician. 

He then in his Vessantara birth in the fourth Tusita 
heaven of wealth (tuso), entered a grove of Sal-trees (Shorea 
robiLsta), his birth-trees, and spent the day there. He there 
received from Sotthya, the god of health (sotthi), the father 
of the sun-physician, eight bundles of Kusha grass. He 
took these to the Bo Pipal or Asvattha (Ficus religiosa) tree, 
the mother-tree succeeding the Kushika Banyan-tree. This 
was on a rising ground sacred to Durga, the mountain- 
goddess, the twin sister of Krishna, the eighth son of Vasu- 
deva, and the counterpart of the Buddha as the son of 
the eight bundles of Kusha grass. He stood under the 
Bo-tree, facing the North, as the sun going northward. 
Thence he went round to the West, taking the left-hand 
path of the female Su-astika, whence he returned to the 
North looking southward, and came back to the West 
looking to the East, whence he was to rise at the equinox. 
He then scattered the grass on the East so as to form a seat 
fourteen cubits long, or the length of the lunar period inter- 
vening between him and his rising. 

These eight bundles of Kusha grass were, in the orginal 
story, the eight rays of the eight-rayed star. In the birth- 
legend of the caste or guild of the Baidyas or physicians, 
the men of knowledge (budh)> they appear as the bunch of 
Kusha grass, which Galava placed in the lap of the mother 
of the race Bir-bhadra, the sainted {bliadrd) wood, the central 
tree of the village grove. From this her son Dhanv-antari, 



474 History and Chronology 

the internal {ant art) flowing stream {dhanv), the ever-moving 
river of intellectual thought, was born as the first physician, 
the counterpart of the Buddha x . His father Galava, mean- 
ing in the Rigveda the pure Soma or Sap, is in Pali the 
tree Symplocus racemosa, called Lodh in Bengal. The bark 
when mixed with that of Hari-taka {Terminalia cJiebnld), 
a myrobolan tree allied to the Arjuna {Terminalia belerica), 
Al {morinda tinctorid) flowers of Dhowra {Grislea to- 
mentosa) and Munjlt {madder), forms the Ahur or red powder 2 
thrown by women on their lovers at the Huli festival, which 
ends at the full moon of Phalgun (February — March). Thus 
this bundle of Kusha grass, the eight-rayed star, is the 
traditional parent of the sun-god, begetting his successor in 
the month ending at the vernal equinox. 

When the sun-god had seated himself on his eastern 
throne of the eight-rayed star he was attacked by Mara, 
the Pole Star tree (marom) ape, coming against him from 
the North, and stopping his Northward progress, heralded 
by the Vijayanuttara trumpet, that of the double {vi) victory 
(Jaya) of the North (uttara), blown by Sakko, the wet-god 
of the South. Mara wished to make the new sun-god of 
the ecliptic year-circle the god of the vernal equinox of the 
age of the three-years cycle. He launched at him nine 
storms of (i) wind, (2) rain, (3) rocks, (4) lightnings, (5) 
charcoal, (6) ashes, (7) sand, (8) mud, (9) darkness ; the nine 
days of the cycle-year week. He then threw at him his 
sceptre-javelin, with "a barb like a wheel," the spear of the 
god of the year of the wheel revolving like the fire-drill 
of the heavenly oil-press of the Chukra-varti, or wheel- 
turning kings. This became the flower-garland of the god- 
dess-mother of spring, which over canopied the new-born 
sun-god as he entered his Vessantara birth in the month 
of the vernal equinox as the year-god of the Tusita heaven 
of wealth, the god of the trading merchant kings, whose 
primitive villages had become ruling cities. This god, who 

1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Baidya, vol. i. pp. 46, 47. 

2 Clarke, Roxburgh's Flora Indica, pp. 415, 416. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 475 

puts to flight the armies of Mara, celebrated his birth by 
making the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk, 
and by healing all diseases as the sun-physician J . 

He began his year in Cheit (March — April) with the 
vernal equinox, to become, as we shall see in the account 
of his birth as Parikshit, the circling-sun of the Mahabha- 
rata, the white horse of the sun which entered Gemini at the 
vernal equinox about 6200 B.C. This was the year sacred 
to the twin children of the Vessantara god Jali, the net, 
and Kanha or Krishna Jina 2 , that is, the conquering black 
{Kanhd, Krishna) goddess, the goddess Durga of the year of 
thirteen lunar months, the Pandavas year of Chapter VIII. 
This year, not measured by the sun, was that which the 
sun-god, spent on the Vanka-giri, or crooked mountain, 
and renounced his wife Maddi, the honey-queen, the sun- 
maiden Suria, to whom he had been married as Soma, 
the moon-god. 

During the first seven days of his new year as the 
Vessantara god he sat under the Pipal-tree, and on the 
morning of the eighth day he went to the North-east, 
whence the sun rises at the summer solstice. He spent 
seven days standing steadfastly on this spot, and then be- 
tween this and the Pipal-tree he made the walk running 
from South-west to North-east, known as the Path of 
Nineteen Steps of the Buddha. This is close to the Vaj- 
rasun or thunder-bolt {yajrd) throne of the Buddha at Budh 
Gaya, the place of the holy Pipal-trcc. Underneath the 
Vajrasun there were found a number of relics in gold, 
silver and precious stones. There arc nineteen gold relics 
and seventy-six, or 19 x 4, disks. In a small stupa, near 
the end of the Buddha's walk, two small trays of relics 
were found, among which were nineteen lapis-lazuli beads 
and nineteen other precious stones 3. 

1 Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories : The NictTuiakcitlia., pp. 96 — 104. 

2 She is called Krishna. Jina. in the form of the Buddhist birth-story given 
in Hardy's Manual of Buddhism, pp. 1S0, 181. 

5 F. Pincott, ' The Vajrasun or Thunderbolt seat of the Mahabodhi Temple. ' 



476 History and Chronology 

That these nineteen steps and the series of nineteen 
sacred objects were connected with the measurement of a 
year more alien in its forms to the solar years measured 
by zodiacal stars than the lunar year of thirteen months, 
seems to be proved by the year used by the Babis of Persia 
and by other evidence, which I will now record. The Babis 
are a new sect which arose in Persia in 1843 A.D., who 
claim to be recipients of special divine enlightenment and 
a new revelation. But they are clearly connected with 
and are probably a revival of the mystic schools of the Shia 
Mahommedans of Persia, whose year was, as we have seen, 
ruled by the twins Hasain and Hosain, the stars Gemini. 
The prophet who introduced this new faith called himself 
first the Bab or the Gate, that is the Gate of the Twin 
Stars, and afterwards Nukta or fount of inspiration, and 
with him were eighteen disciples, a number probably con- 
nected with the eighteen-months year of Chapter IX., a 
year of 360 days. It began in the history of the Buddha, 
as we have seen, at the vernal equinox. Among the Babis 
the months are not divided into weeks, but there are in the 
year nineteen months of nineteen days each, and 361 days 
in all, one day more than the year of 360 days. The 
Babis cite the Koran as authorising their year, as in the 
sentence of the invocation beginning each chapter Bis- 
mi'llahi'r Rahmani'r Rahim there are nineteen letters, count- 
ing the r's as one letter, and the total numbers of Chapters 
is 114=: 19x6 1 . 

The nineteen days of the month of this year are repre- 
sented in the astronomical temple of the British goddess 
Epona, the White Horse of the sun at Stonehenge. This 
is oriented to the North-east rising point of the sun of the 
summer solstice marked by the gnomon-stone called the 
Friar's Heel. The shadow thrown by the sun rising behind 
this stone falls on the line intervening between it and the 

Transactions of the Ninth Congress of Orientalists, 1892, vol. i. pp. 247, 
248. 

E. G. Browne, ' The Babis of Persia.' J.R.A.S., 1889, pp. 921 — 923. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 477 

sun-circle. It is on this line that the sacrificial stone for the 
sacrifice of animal victims is placed. The sun-circle is formed 
by thirty lofty Sarsen stones, the produce of local quarries, 
joined in pairs to represent the thirty days of the month. 
Inside this is an older circle of thirty-six syenite stones 
brought from Dartmoor x , to indicate probably the thirty-six 
half-months of the eighteen-months year of Chapter IX., 
which was, as we shall see, a year of the white sun-horse, and 
one of five-day weeks, like the first Pleiades and solstitial 
years and the year of Orion. To this have been added four 
Sarsen pillars to increase the number to forty, the forty 
months of the three-years cycle. To the South-west of the 
sun-altar of micaceous sandstone from Derbyshire, which is 
in the centre of the circle, is a semi-circle or horse-shoe 
of nineteen diorite stones, and behind them is the outer 
horse-shoe of fourteen Sarsen stones, each pair united by 
a lintel stone at the top. These represent the horse-shoes 
of the White Horse of the sun, drawn on so many of the 
chalk hills in the neighbourhood, the god worshipped with 
the bloodless rites of the earlier sun-god of Orion's year. 

These two horse-shoes clearly, like the other arrangements 
of the stones, indicate year measurements ; the horse-shoes 
of fourteen paired stones must denote the fourteen days of 
the lunar phases of the year of thirteen lunar months of 
twenty-eight days each, which preceded the year of twelve 
months of thirty days and denoted hy the thirty stones of 
the outer circle, and the only year measurements belonging 
to the earlier age of the sun-horse of the diorite stones in 
which nineteen occurs is this year of the nineteen steps 
of the Buddha 2 . 

The correctness of this hypothesis as to the meaning of 
the nineteen diorite stones of Stonehenge is corroborated 

1 Or perhaps by water up the Avon from the sacred diorite rocks of Britanv. 

2 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, Essay viii., pp. 138 — 144. 
When I wrote this description of Stonehenge, though I saw that the temple 
was connected with the worship of the Buddha, I had not yet grasped the 
fact of the connection between it and the Buddha's nineteen step^. 



478 History and Chronology 

by the stone circles of Cornwall, whence the diorite stones 
were brought, for there, near Boscawen and its neighbourhood 
in Cornwall, are four hundred circles, each of nineteen stones, 
which must apparently mean the months of the year of 
nineteen months of nineteen days each J . 

The third week of the birth of the Buddha as the sun-god, 
the last of the three seven-day weeks making the twenty-one- 
days month of the seventeen-months year of Chapter VIII., 
was spent in walking up and down the path of the nineteen 
steps. The fourth week he passed in a house built by the 
angels of the seven sacred jewels to the North-west of the 
Bo-tree, where he thought out the seven books of the Abid- 
hamma Pitaka, that is to say, organised the next year in 
this series, the first year of the seven-days week. 

This fourth week was the last of the month of the lunar 
year of thirteen months, and at its end he left the Bo or 
Pipal-tree and went back to the Nigrodha or Banyan-tree, 
where he spent the fifth week in completing his task of 
thinking out the fundamental principles of his system of 
ethical religion. 

He was there tempted by the three daughters of the evil 
angel Mara, originally the god of the winter season like the 
Zend Ahriman. They are called Tanha, Craving, AratI, 
Discontent, and Raga, Lust, and are parallel with the creating 
principles of the Sankhya philosophy, Tamas, Darkness, or 
the void ; Rajas, Desire ; and Sattwa, Completion 2 . These 
creating-gods of the metaphysicians were the algebraic form 
of enunciating the proposition on which their system was 
based, that is to say, they believed, like Hegel, that non- 
existence was stirred into activity by desire of a change, 
and that from the union of the two being was evolved. 
That is to say, in their views thought was the origin and 
measure of all things, and they ignored as inconceivable the 
underlying self or germ of the Vedantists, or rather they 

1 Thurnam, on Megalithic Circles, Decade iv. ; Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, 
2nd edition, chap. v. p. 1 1 7. 

2 Ballantyne, Sankhya Aphorisms of Kapila, Book i., Aphorism 61, p. 71. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 479 

interpreted this self as aspiration. But to the Vedantists 
this germ was the sole reality, the Tao of the Chinese, the 
indwelling and ruling will, the Nameless Simplicity, which 
does nothing itself but drives round on the ordained path, 
Tao, the whole annually recurring succession of natural 
phenomena ; it is the inherent electric spark which makes 
life differ from death. Tn the words of the Chinese poet, 
the Tao or path charged with vital electricity is 

Simplicity without a name 
Is free from all external aim, 
With no desire, at rest and still 
All things go right as of their will I . 

It was this driving-germ which was brought to earth by 
the rain, which generated in the mother-tree the fruit which 
was to rise to heaven as the sun emanating from the elephant- 
cloud-bird Gan-isha, and in analysis there seems to be no 
difference between the Sankhya Desire and the Vedantist Self. 

It was these metaphysical cobwebs which were the temp- 
tations offered to the meditating Buddha, and he cast them 
aside as vain and frivolous, forbade his followers to enquire 
into the mysteries of philosophy, and bid them accept the fact 
that each of them existed, and was able by cultivating his 
moral being to make his existence on earth a blessing to all 
whom he or she influenced directly or indirectly during their 
lifetime, and to return the germ to the other world so 
consecrated as to be incapable of being defiled by sin in 
a future existence. 

At the end of this fifth week of wrestling with philo- 
sophical tempters, he left the Banyan-tree and went to the 
first mother-tree of edible fruit before the consecration of 
the Syrian fig-tree. This was the Mucalinda-tree (Barring- 
tonia Acutangiild), the Ijul or Indian oak, flowering at the 
beginning of the rainy season, which had been the sacred oak 
of the Zends and Cymric Druids, the nut-tree of the Todas 
and Jews, and the walnut-tree of the witch-mothers. It was 

1 Legge, The Texts of Taoism, Introduction ; S.B.E., vol. xxxix. p. 26. 



480 History and Chronology 

under this that he spent his sixth week. The seventh week 
completing the forty-nine days of his sustenance on the 
creating rice of the eight-rayed star-god and his period of 
Pentecostal preparation he passed under a Raja-yatana-tree 
(Buchanonia latifolia), the Pyar or Chironji-tree, bearing 
a fruit like small almonds, eaten by all the forest-people of 
Central India. On the forty-ninth day he was fed by 
Sakko with the fruit of the Haritaka or Myrobolan-tree of 
Calculation, which was, as we have seen, one of the ingre- 
dients of the Huli red powder, sacred to the sun-god of the 
vernal equinox. He also received from Sakko as a tooth- 
cleaner and digestive the thorn of the Nagalata or Piper 
Betul, the Betul creeper, of which the nut is eaten as a 
digestive by all rice-eating Hindus. 

When the sun-god had thus gained complete knowledge, 
mastered the arts of the astronomical calculation of time 
and the underlying principles which make spiritual per- 
fection possible and attainable by every human being, he 
was visited under the Pyar almond-tree by two travelling 
merchants from the South, who were going North-west to 
the middle kingdom, Jambu-dwipa, who brought him a rice- 
cake and a honey-cake. Their names, Tapassu and Bhalluka, 
show them to represent the eight rays of the eight-rayed 
star; Tapassu represents the heated and heating-sun {tap). 
He is a form of Tapati, the burning-one, the sun-maiden - 
mother of the Kurus, who was given by Vashishtha, the god 
of the altar-flame, as a wife to Samvarana, the king of the 
Bharatas, after Vashishtha had enabled him to overcome the 
ten Akshauhinis of the Panchalas I . Bhalluka is a form 
of the bear Bhalla, the Hindi Baluk, and represents the 
seven stars of the Great Bear, in short, they represent the 
eight gods of the eight-rayed star, of which the sun is the 
eighth. They are the two caskets called Tapas, Penance, and 
Dlksha, Consecration, in which, according to the Brahmanas, 
the Soma or year-sap of the Gayatrl metre of the year of the 

1 Mahabharata Adi {Sambhava) Parva, xciv. pp. 280, 281. This is a 
variant form of the story of Kalmashapada the mad king, told in Chapter VI. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 481 

eight-days week was brought by the Shyena frost (Shy a) 
bird, called Su-parna or the feather of Su, from Krishanu, 
the rainbow-god, and given to Kadru, the tree (dni) of Ka, 
the tree-mother of the Nagas I . 

It was these gods of the eight-rayed star who consecrated 
the sun-god as the ruler and teacher of the united races of 
Hindus, born of Northern and Southern parents, as sons of 
the rice-mother-cake inspired by the honey of the Northern 
prophets. 

To receive this heavenly food of the rice-mother-sun, the 
Munda sun-bird, and the honey-eating bear of the North, 
the sun-god required a new bowl to replace the earthenware 
and golden bowls he had thrown away. To supply this the 
Loka-pala angels brought four day bowls of sapphire from 
the blue sky and four of the jet of night, and from these 
they made one bowl, said by Hiouen Tsiang to be of a deep 
blue colour and translucent 2 . From this bowl, the vault of 
heaven, the sun-god ate his Pentecostal meal on the eve 
of the fiftieth day after his Vessantara birth at the vernal 
equinox, or about the 10th of May, when, as we shall see, his 
next year began, that described in Chapter VIII., the year 
following the year of the almond-tree. 

He now in this last transformation ceased to be the man- 
god, for he tore all his human hair from his head and became 
the independent ruler of heaven and earth, whose unerring 
will was the law of all things. 

But in order to fully understand the history of the instal- 
lation of sun-worship as told in the birth of the Buddha, 
we must turn to that of his duplicate the circling-sun 
Parikshit of the Mahabharata. His father was Abhimanyu, 
the foremost (abhi) mind (manyu), son of Arjuna and Su- 
bhadra, the mountain goddess Durga, twin-sister of Krishna. 
Abhimanyu became, as we are told in the Mahabharata, the 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 6, 2, 7- — 1 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 150, 151 

2 Rhys Davids, Buddliist Birth Stories : The Nidanakatha, The Last Epoch, 
pp. 105 — no; Beale, Buddhist Records of the Western World, The Travels 
of Hiouen Tsiang, vol. ii. p. 130. 

I i 



482 History and Chronology 

moon-god when all the heroes of this historical poem became 
stars r . He was slain on the twelfth day of the final battle 
of eighteen days fought between the Kauravyas and Pan- 
davas, and his slayer was the son of Dusshasana 2 . 

Dusshasana was a son of Dhritarashtra and brother of 
Duryodhana, who was, as we have seen, the ruling god 
of the eleven-months year. In the list of the eleven sons 
of Dhritarashtra, who ruled the months of this year, Dussha- 
sana's name comes second after that of Duryodhana 3. 
Its four seasons were ruled by Duryodhana, Kama, Shakuni, 
the raven, and Dusshasana, the ill-omened (dus) son of the 
moon-hare (s/iasa), who ruled the autumn rainy season and 
counselled DrupadI to choose another husband 4, when the 
Pandavas had lost their wealth in gambling with Shakuni, 
the summer raven of the hot season. This husband was 
to be Duryodhana, who sought to seduce her by showing 
his left thigh 5. As the god of the eleven-months year 
he was the god of the left thigh, and it was as the god of the 
two parent-thighs that he was slain in single combat by 
Bhima, the son of Maroti, the tree-ape, when he as selected 
champion of the Pandavas accepted the challenge of Duryo- 
dhana to decide finally by a duel to the death of one or other 
combatant, the contest in which the Kauravya army had 
been annihilated. In his challenge Duryodhana claimed 
to be the ruling god of the year, for he said, " Like the year 
which gradually meets with all the seasons I shall meet with 
all of you in fight 6 ." The Pandavas represented the five 
seasons of the year, and Bhima was the god of the summer 
season ending with the summer solstice. It was this con- 
quering god of summer who ended the war between the gods 
of the eleven-months and those of the solar-year by breaking 

1 Mahabharata (Swarja-rohanika) Parva, iv. 19, p. 12. 

2 Mahabharata Drona {Abhi?nanyu-badha) Parva, xlix. 13, 14, p. 147. 

3 Mahabharata Adi {Adivanshavatarana) Parva, lxiii. p. 180. 

4 Mahabharata Sabha {Anadyuta), Parva, lxxvi. pp. 202, 204. 

5 Mahabharata Sabha {Anadytita) Parva, Ixxi. p. 191. 

6 Mahabharata Shalya {Gud-Ayiidha) Parva, xxxii. 17, p. 127. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 483 

both the thighs of Duryodhana x , and thus killing the leader 
of the age when time was reckoned by the fixed stars. 

The wife of Abhimanyu, the moon-god, was Uttara, the 
North Pole Star sister of Uttara, the Polar constellation 
of the Great Bear, who was charioteer to Arjuna. After the 
final defeat of the Kauravyas and the death of Duryodhana, 
Ashvatthaman, the son of Drona, the tree-trunk, the god 
of the Ashvattha tree {Ficus religiosd) under which the 
Buddha defeated Mara and entered on his Vessantara birth, 
entered the camp of the Pandavas by night and slew all the 
sons of DrupadT, leaving the Pandavas without living heirs, 
as Abhimanyu had also been slain. Ashvatthaman when 
arrested by the Pandavas prepared a weapon for their final 
destruction in the creating blade of Kusha grass, which he 
threw into the wombs of the Pandava women as Galava 
threw the Kusha grass into the lap of Bir-bhadra, the mother 
of the sun-physician. This engendering grass begetting the 
sun-god liable to yearly death by the winter withering of 
nature was intended to cause the offspring of Uttara to 
belong to this class of dying gods, but Krishna frustrated 
this intention by declaring that he would raise again to 
life the dying child who would rule the world for a cycle 
of sixty years as Parikshit, the circling sun. 

The contest between Ashvatthaman, the last year- god 
of the age of the mother-tree, and the Pandavas ended in his 
release on condition of his resigning to them the gem which 
made him ruler of heaven and earth 2 . This gem was the 
creative force residing in the year-god, who became hence- 
forth the undying sun-god who made his yearly way round 
the heavens in the path of the ecliptic starsi 

Thus we see that the father and mother of Parikshit, 
the sun-god, were Soma, the moon-god, and the sun-maiden, 
the Pole Star goddess-bird, who was in the Vedic marriage 
hymn brought to the wedding by the Ashvins, the stars 
Gemini. The wedding in the Mahabharata is described 

1 Mahabharata Shalya (Gut-Ayicdha) Parva, lviii. p. 227. 

2 Mahabharata Sauptika Parva, xiii. iS — 22, xv. 27 — 35, xvi. 1 — 16, pp. 
48, $2, 53- 

I i 2 



484 



History and Chronology 



as an alliance between the phallus-worshipping Matsyas, 
the sons of the river-fish, the eel-god, and the Bharatas, 
sons of the mother-sun-bird Sakuntala, and it took place 
after Arjuna, guided by Uttara his charioteer, had, under 
the banner of the ape with the lion's tail, the meaning of 
which I have described in Chapter IV. p. 151, and VI. p. 329 r , 
recovered the cows of light from the Kauravyas. That the 
birth of the sun-god Parikshit born of this marriage was 
parallel with the Vessantara birth of the Buddha in the Tusita 
heaven of wealth is proved by the Mahabharata narrative. 
Before the birth took place the Pandava parent-gods of the 
coming year set forth to the South, the realm of Marutta, 
the ape-tree-god, under the constellation Dhruva pointing 
to the Pole, explained as that of Taurus in which RohinI 
Aldebaran was. Their camp was laid out with six roads 
and nine divisions, exactly on the model of the Chinese 
Central Sun Palace called the Hall of Distinction, repre- 
senting the year which the Emperor opens by the Ploughing 
Festival 2 . 

N 
Tenth month Eleventh month Twelfth month 



Tenth month 



a. a 



w 



m ,h 



§ 

3 



Sixth month 



Eleventh month l Twelfth month 



Centre month 



Fifth month 



Fourth month 



Sixth month 



Fifth month 
S 



Fourth month 



1 Mahabharata Virata {Vaivdhika) Parva, Ixxi., lxxii. pp. 181— 185. 

2 Legge, Li-chl, The Yueh Ling, Book iv., sect, i., part i. 9 ; S.B.E., vol. 
xxvii. pp. 251, note 1, 252. 



6f the Myth- Making Age. 485 

In this historical diagram the corner squares each re- 
present two, and the centre squares forming the equinoctial 
St. George's cross, one of the twelve months, and the 
centre square the thirteenth month, to be described in 
Chapter VIII. 

On their arrival at the south, that is at the winter solstice, 
when the sun was in Taurus, about 10,200 B.C., they offered 
sacrifices to the gods * of the Pole Star age, on an altar 
thatched with Kusha grass, including the three-eyed Shiva 
of the cycle-year. They there obtained the gold of the 
heaven of wealth they sought for in the gold-mines ot 
Southern India, which now appear to have been first worked, 
all the former gold being supplied by the river sands of 
Chutia Nagpur, and the hill streams of the Pamir Himalayas. 
They returned northwards by short marches I , arriving at 
the Kauravya city Hastinapur, the city of the Hasta or 
Pandava constellation Corvus, the modern Delhi, a month 
after the birth of Parikshit, that is at the end of Phalgun 
(February — March) at the vernal equinox 2 . 

When Parikshit was first born as the child in the cradle 
of the Twins, he was lifeless, but was recalled to life by 
Krishna, the god of the year beginning January — February, 
and began his life in Phalgun (February — March) 3, when the 
Buddha was born under the Ashvattha-tree, that is when the 
sun was in Gemini in that month, about 8200 B.C. It was 
a week before the full-moon of Phalgun, when, according to 
the Brahmanas, preparations for the festival of the annual 
circuit of the heavens by the sun-horse were made 4, and 
according to the Mahabharata the horse Parikshit started 
on his course at the full-moon of Cheit (March — April), or 
about the 1st of April. But the race was begun in Phalgun 
(February — March), for Phalguna or Arjuna was appointed 



1 Mahabharata Ashvamedha {Anugita) Parva, Ixiii., lxiv. pp. 164 — 171. 

- Mahabharata Ashvamedha {Anugita) Parva, Ixx. 13, 14, p. 17S. 

3 Mahabharata Ashvamedha {Anugita) Parva, lxvi.— Ixx. , pp. 170—179. 

4 Eggeling, Sat. Brd/i., xiii. 4, 1,4; S.B.E., vol. xliv. p. 348. 



486 History and Chronology 

to attend Parikshit 1 . Parikshit is not named in the poem 
as the horse, but is spoken of as a man, but the horse 
that represented him is said to have had a head like a black 
antelope, and he was followed by Arjuna in a chariot drawn 
by white horses 2 . * 

The course of the white sun-horse, as described in the 
Mahabharata, was first to the North-west, the land of the 
Trigartas, the place of the summer solstice, from thence it 
went to the South-west, through the country of Central India 
ruled by Bhagadatta, the god of the tree with edible fruit 
ibhagd). From the South it turned to the North-east to 
Manipur, in Assam, the land of the Naga races, which 
it reached as the Equinoctial states of the Eastern sun. It 
was here that Arjuna, who, as protector of the horse, had 
to meet and vanquish the rulers of the solstices and equinoxes 
whom he had to pass, was all but slain by his son Vabhru- 
vahana, son of Chitrangada, daughter of Chitra-vahana, King 
of Manipur, that is the offspring of the eleven-months year 
ruled by the star Chitra Virgo 3. 

This contest, in which the Naga rulers of heaven tried to 
bring back the sun under the rule of the cycle-year, is exactly 
parallel with the Buddha's fight with Mara at the same period 
of his year's course. From the East the sun-horse went to 
Magadha, whence it returned to Hastinapur, where the sacri- 
fice of the sun-horse took place at the full-moon of Cheit 4. 
The preparations for the sacrifice of the returning sun-horse, 
who began his year with the full-moon, and not with the 
new-moon of Bhishma, began to be made on the full-moon 
of Magh (January — February), or two months before the 
sacrifice. This took place fifteen days before the Fordicidia 
at Rome, when the blood of the October horse was offered. 
It is noteworthy that the circuit made by the horse as 

1 Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugi(a) Parva, lxxxii., Ixxxiii. pp. 181 — 185. 

2 Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Amigita) Parva, lxxxii. 7, p. 184. 

3 Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugita) Parva, lxxix., lxxx. pp. 197—204, 
Adi {Arjuna-vanavasa) Parva, ccxvi., ccxvii. pp. 593 — 598. 

4 Mahabharata Ashvamedha {Anugita) Parva, Ixxiv.— lxxxiv. pp. 185— 213. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 487 

described in the Mahabharata is not made sunwise, but 
contrary to the course of the sun of the summer solstice. 
This circuit of the horse of the eight-rayed star was 
therefore not that of the sun-god finally accepted as the 
fully emancipated ruler. This last circuit is that of the 
complete Buddha whose final installation I have described, 
and who ended his forty-nine days of sustenance on the rice 
of the golden bowl, about the 10th of May. He then became 
the sun-god described in the Buddhist birth-stories, who 
received his birth-offering from Su-jata at the full-moon 
of Vaisakha (April — May), or about May Day, and who 
began his year on the 15th of April, as the St. George of 
our national mythology, the sun-god born from the Easter 
egg when the sun was in Gemini at that date, or about 
4200 B.C., the same epoch as when it was in Taurus at the 
vernal equinox. But before we reach that date there 
are other variant forms of the year to be described, and 
one of these, the year of eighteen months, introduced at 
the Horse sacrifice of Parikshit, will be the subject of 
Chapter IX. 

In the history of the births of these sun-gods, the Buddha 
and Parikshit, we have a panoramic picture of the march 
of time from the age when the year began with the birth 
of the sun-god in the constellation Gemini at the winter 
solstice. This was about 12,200 B.C. But in tracing 
the stages of the successive births we must begin our re- 
trospect before the Mahosadha birth of the Buddha as the 
sun-physician, which took place, as we have seen, about 
10,200 B.C., when the sun was in Gemini in January — 
February, in the year he appeared at the New Year's 
ploughing ceremony, and also before his Vessantara birth, 
coinciding with that of Parikshit, which took place about 
8200 B.C., when the sun was in Gemini in the beginning 
of February — March. The original form assumed by this 
conception of the series of consecutive births was apparently, 
as I have shown in Chapter VI. p. 332, the calendar reckoned 
by both Akkadian and Indian astronomers, which began the 



488 History and Chronology 

year with the three months' concealment of the sun- 
god, during which the infant sun was guarded by the 
moon-goddess, called by the Buddhists GotamT Mahapaja- 
pati, the first of the thirteen Theris ruling the thirteen 
months of the year, and the female form of Prajapati Orion. 
During these three months, reckoned in the Akkadian 
calendar as beginning in Kislev (November — December) 
and ending at the close of Sebet (January — February), 
time was measured by the track of the moon through the 
thirty stars. These three months were also those of the 
Hindu Ashtakas ending in the last fortnight of Magha 
(January — February) with the Ekashtaka, when the re- 
vealed sun-god, released from his dependance on his moon- 
nurse, was born " as the son of the majesty of Indra," and 
started on his divine mission as the revealer of truth on 
his horse Kanthika, the star Pegasus, the second of the 
thirty stars. The three months which in this reckoning 
began the year of the thirteen Theris ignore the earlier 
phase of the history of this three months' seclusion of the 
infant sun-god as they take no account of his Mahosadha 
birth in January — February, and place the Vessantara birth 
of the released sun-god at the close of February — March, 
or in the phase of the moon succeeding the birth of Parik- 
shit. The sun-god who emerged from obscurity at the 
New Year's ploughing ceremony of January — February, 
must have begun his three months' seclusion in October- 
November with the Deothan, or lifting up of Krishna on the 
nth of the bright half of Khartik (October — November) 1 . 
This is about the date assumed as the beginning of the three 
months' trance of Cu-chulainn, who was, as we have seen, 
a sun-god whose strength lay in his left thigh, and who 
therefore in his first avatar was a god of the eleven-months 
year, who began his career by wedding, on the 1st of Novem- 
ber, Emer, the daughter of Forgall of the Gardens of Lugh, 
the home of the Southern sun, and who gained his bride 

1 Elliot, Memoirs of the Races of the North-Wcstem Provinces of India, 
voL i., Supplementary Glossary, Part ii., Dithwan, pp. 245 — 247. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 489 

by killing twenty-four of her twenty-seven warders, the 
twenty-seven days of the month of the cycle-year. Three 
of them, Scibur, Ibur and Cat, Emer's brethren, he allowed 
to escape. The contest, in which the sun-god appeared 
after his three months' trance as the warrior sun-god, seven- 
teen years old, was that waged for the possession of the 
Brown Bull of Cuailgne, hidden in Glenn Samaisce, the 
Heifer's Glen in Slieve Gullion in North-east Ulster. Ailill, 
the Welsh Ellyll, the dwarf, and Medb or Meave, who ruled 
Connaught and the Western home of the setting sun, wished 
to add this eighth solar animal, the bull of the rising sun 
of the summer solstice, to the seven they already possessed : 
the two sun-rams, two sun-horses, two sun-boars owned by 
them both, and the white horned-bull of Ailill born from 
Meave's cows. Daire Mac Fachtna, the guardian of the 
brown bull, refused to lend it to Meave, and she and Ailill 
determined to take it by force. She summoned to her 
aid, among others, her sons, the seven Maine, of whom, 
though seven are mentioned, six only are named in the 
Ta'in Bo' Cuailgne, Maithremail, Aithremail, Cotageib Ule, 
Mingor, Morgor and Conda or Maine, Mo'-epert, leaving 
out Milscothach or Honey Bloom, and Andoe, which appear 
in the list of the Maine of the eight-days week. The 
war was for the possession of the eighth Maine, the Brown 
Bull, rising in the North-east. 

The chief opponent of the advance of the armies of the 
setting sun was Cu-chulainn, who contended single-handed 
against them. It was during this contest that his three 
months' seclusion took place, after he had been nearly slain 
by the arts of the Morrigu, the sea {muir) mother, the 
goddess Bahu, who appeared, while he fought with Loch 
More, as a white red-cared heifer, the star RohinI (Alde- 
baran) of Orion's year, an eel, the mother of the sons of 
the rivers of the year of six-day weeks; and the wolf sun- 
mother-goddess. The wounds she got in this combat were 
healed by the three draughts of milk Cu-chulainn took- 
from her, and it was after this reconcilement with the 



490 History and Chronology 

Southern mother of life and of the sun of the winter 
solstice that Cu-chulainn's trance of regeneration began. 
He was put to sleep by a man-god in a green mantle, coming 
from the North-east, and his sleep lasted " from the Monday 
before Samhain, the 31st of October, to the Wednesday after 
the feast of St. Bridget," the 1st of February, or during 
the months of October — November, November — December, 
December — January. It was during this time that his 
corps of boy-warriors, the companions of the old sun-god 
of the Pole Star age, were destroyed by the hosts of the 
West. After awaking from his trance he mounted his 
scythed chariot, threw off his mantle of invisibility, and ap- 
peared as the warrior sun-god clothed in a deer-skin gar- 
ment, the Hindu sacred skin of the black antelope-god 
Krishna, the eighth son of Vasudeva. As the revived sun- 
god he slew the twenty-seven sons of Calatin, the twenty- 
seven days of the months of the cycle-year. We are told 
that after Cu-chulainn's victories, and the death of Ailill's 
white horned-bull, slain by the brown bull of the rising 
sun, Ailill and Meave sent messengers to the astrolo- 
gers of Alba (East Europe) and Babylon to learn the 
magical arts by which they could destroy Cu-chulainn, a 
tradition which adds further evidence to that furnished by 
the mythology of the Irish and Welsh Celts in proof of 
the continual emigration to Western Europe of Indian 
and Eastern theology and astronomical methods of mea- 
suring time r . 

H. Patroclus as a year-god of this year. 

Before closing the list of sun-physicians the gods of this 
year, I must call attention to the historical evidence furnished 
by the story of Patroclus. He was one of the sun-physicians, 
for it was he who tended and cured Eurupulos, when besought 
by him as one skilled in medicine to heal his wound inflicted 

1 Hull, The Cuchullin Saga, pp. 60, S3, 114, 115, 119, 157, 164 — 168, 170 — 
174, 182, 236; Rhys, Hibbert Lectures for 1886, Lect. ii. pp. 137, 138, iv. 
pp. 366, 367. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 491 

by the arrow of Paris, which afterwards slew the sun-god 
Achilles, by piercing his heel, his only vulnerable part T . 
Eurupulos, whose name means the wide gate, is said to have 
been the son of Poseidon, married to Sterope, the daughter 
of Helios the sun, so he is one of the husbands of the sun- 
maiden. He was a creating-god of this year, for he gave 
a clod of earth to Euphemus, who threw it into the sea, where 
it became the island Kallisto, the most beautiful, that of the 
Great Bear goddess of the same name, also his connection 
with the gate marks him as one of the Twins. Patroclus 
took the arms of Achilles when the sun-god of the Naga 
worshippers of the serpent Echis, from which Achilles 
derived his name, was obscured by the mule race of lunar- 
solar gods. As the sun-god of that epoch, the equivalent of 
the sun-gods Kama, Perseus, Sigurd, he wore the impenetrable 
coat of mail, and the helm of awning, the cap of invisibility. 
These were the arms given to Achilles by Cheiron, the 
Centaur, but he could not wield the ashen spear which 
Cheiron gave Peleus, the god of the potter's clay. This was 
the world's ash-tree Ygg-drasil, the supporting pole of the 
heavens, and the fire-drill turned by the Master Potter, the 
ape-father-god of the Thigh. Instead of this he bore two 
spears, the two lunar crescents 2 . 

He was slain by Apollo, the Mouse-god, who came behind 
him in a mist, struck him between the shoulders, and knocked 
his sun-helmet, the kuncc (fewer)) or helmet of the dog-star 
Sirius, which ruled his year with its mid-day in the dog-days. 
This was assumed by Hector his successor 3. His death is 
precisely similar to that of Sigurd, who wore, like Patroclus, 
armour impenetrable in front but vulnerable behind. Sigurd 
was killed, like Patroclus, by a blow dealt by Hagen, the 
god of winter, from behind between his shoulders. The 
most noteworthy part of the story of Patroclus is the estab- 
lishment of the races and games which were held at his 
funeral. These funeral games were, according to tradition, 

' Homer, Iliad, .\i. 821 — S48. -' Ibid., \vi. 135 — 144. 

3 Ibid., xvi. 790- Soo 



492 History and Chronology oj the Myth-Making Age. 

instituted by Acastus, the husband of Hippolyte. Her name, 
meaning she who is released from horses, describes her as 
the moon-goddess ruling the year, and making her own way 
through heaven without being drawn by the star-horses 
which drew the chariots of the sun-gods, the stars of day, 
Krishna and Achilles. She falsely accused Peleus, the father 
of Achilles, of attempting to violate her, an accusation which, 
as I have shown in Chapter VI. p. 340, note 1, was made against 
other ruling-gods of the eleven-months year. Acastus, by 
his name, shows his affinity with the physicians, for it means 
he who cuts with the knife {aic7]) } that is, with the crescent- 
shaped knife of the male moon-god, the god of the crescent 
new-moon, who was husband of the full-moon, who before 
the lunar age had been the year-sun-bird of the Pole Star 
god. 

I shall prove in the next Chapter that it was at this epoch 
of the close of the year of eight-day weeks that the national 
chariot races inaugurating the year of the independent sun- 
god were instituted. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



The years of seven-day weeks and seventeen and 
thirteen months. 

THE year of seventeen months succeeded, as we are told 
in the Brahmanas, the fifteen-months year. It is one 
of five seasons, in which both new and full-moon sacrifices 
were offered, and the year-fires lighted at its commencement 
must be kindled not with fifteen, as in the fifteen-months 
year, but with seventeen or twenty-one kindling verses *. 
In the ritual of this year sacrifices were offered in libations, 
and its duration of seventeen months is first ritualistically 
attested in the invocations to the five seasons made at the 
opening sacrifice of the year. The summonses to the season- 
gods called to these sacrifices contain, as the Brahmanas 
point out, seventeen syllables, for Prajapati, the year-god, 
"is seventeen fold," and they end with the vashat or varshat 
call for rain (var) ; so that it is a year-offering with a festival 
of which the presiding deity is the rain-god 2 . The number 
seventeen is also brought prominently forward in the chants 
of the ritual of the Vajapeya festival with which the year 
opens. The first ceremony performed outside the sacrificial 
ground was that summoning the Ashvins, the stars Gemini, 
by the Bahish-pavamana Stotra. This, as we have seen in 
Chapter VII. p. 392, consisted of three Gayatrl triplets, each 
of twenty-four syllables, so that the whole contained seventy- 
two syllables, the number of five-day weeks in the year. 
To the nine lines of this invocation eight are added at the 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., i. 3, 5, 10, 11 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 97, 98. 

2 Ibid., i. 5, 2, 16—20; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 142 — 144; Hewitt, Ruling 
Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 165, note 6. 



494 History and Chronology 

Vajapeya festival, so as to make the whole hymn contain 
seventeen lines. Similarly the midday chant Madhyandina- 
pavamana is increased from fifteen to seventeen verses, and 
the Arbhava-pavamana, the special chant of this festival, is 
one of seventeen verses x . Also the last chant at the Vaja- 
peya evening sacrifice, called the Brihat-stotra or hymn of 
Brihati, the goddess of the five-days week, has the same 
number of verses 2 . Similarly the SamidhenI stanzas of the 
kindling hymn used at the animal sacrifices of this year are 
increased from eleven, the number of the stanzas of the 
AprI hymns of the original animal burnt-offering, to seven- 
teen by adding nine tristubh verses of eleven syllables 
each to the original eleven Gayatrl stanzas of twenty-four 
syllables each 3. The two hundred and sixty-four syllables 
in the hymn of eleven Gayatrl stanzas, when added to the 
ninety-nine tristubh syllables, make up a total of three 
hundred and sixty-three syllables, the number of days in 
the eleven-months year. Hence, though this year follows 
in time the fifteen-months year, we see that it was looked 
on as a ritualistic descendant of the eleven months, both 
being years of the sun-horse. 

It is a year of seventeen months of twenty-one days each, 
divided into three seven-day weeks, making a total of three 
hundred and fifty-seven days, and, by adding a week to this, 
the three hundred and sixty-four days of the lunar-year 
of thirteen months of twenty-eight days each was completed, 
and this year, as we shall see, existed simultaneously with 
the ritualistic year of Prajapati. That the month of this 
year was one of twenty-one days is proved by the twenty- 
one verses of the morning hymn sung at the Keshava-panlya 
or ceremonial hair-cutting of the king, performed as part 
of the ceremonies of this year on the full-moon of Jaistha 



1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. I, 2, n ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 8, note I. 

2 Ibid., v. I, 2, 19; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 11, note 1. 

3 Ibid., i. 4, 1, 7—39, vi. 2, 1, 22—24; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 102, note I— 
113, vol. xli. p. 167, note I. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 495 

(May — June), about the first of June, a year after his 
coronation r . 

This hymn, called the Uktha-stotra of twenty - one 
Ukthyas 2 , is that addressed to the rising or shining (ukh) 
sun, symbolised in the gold plate with twenty-one knobs, 
which the sacrificer puts on when he, as the charioteer of the 
sun who watches its course round the heavens, carries during 
his initiation (Dikslia) as the symbolic sun, the fire in the fire- 
pan, round the sacrificial ground from the North-east point 
of the rising sun of the summer solstice to the South-east, 
where the sun rises at the winter solstice 3. 

A. The ritual of the making of the fire-pan (Ukha) and 
the birth from it of the sun-god. 

The whole of the ritual of the making and consecration 
of the fire-pan (Ukha) is significant, as it tells by ritualistic 
reproductions of past beliefs a great deal of the history 
of this year. The preparations for making the fire-pan 
begin with the full-moon of Phalgun (February — March), 
the full-moon beginning the year about the 1st of March. 
Then a white hornless goat is offered to Prajapati with 
a silent service, and the fire for the sacrifice is lighted with 
seventeen or, as is said further on, twenty-one kindling 
verses. On the eighth day after the full-moon, about the 
8th of March, the sacrificer begins to collect the earth 
for making the fire-pan which is to be consecrated at the 
new-moon, that is at the beginning of Cheit (March — 
April) 4. The sacrificer contemplated in this ritual is almost 
certainly the Patesi or priest-king of this epoch, who was, 
as at Girsu and in Egypt, the national High-Priest. But 
he, like all primitive rulers, was, unless he had exceptional 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brd/i., v. 5, 3, 2, 3 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 126, note 2 
— 127. 

2 Ibid., xii. 2, 2, 6 ; S.B.E., vol. xliv. pp. 150, 151. 

3 Ibid., v. 1, 7, 3, 1,9; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 277, 280. 

4 Ibid., vi. 2, 2,7, 8, 18 — 22, 23—27, 30; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 174, 179, 
180, 181, 182. 



496 History and Chronology 

force of character, scarcely a free agent. He was bound 
in the fetters of ritual and custom, and could only act 
in strict accordance with precedent and rule, being most 
carefully watched by his counsellors, who, like the Spartan 
ephors, kept the king in the straight course marked out 
for him. The lump of clay of which the fire-pan is to 
be made is dug with a spade made of the hollow female 
bamboo, the supposed wife of the A*havanTya or libation-fire, 
to the north of which it is placed at a cubit's distance before 
being used. The clay is sought for by the help of the three 
animals who had been symbolic rulers of time : the sun- 
horse, the ass of Pilshan and the Ashvins, and the Pole Star 
he-goat. They are led eastward from the Ahavaniya when 
in search of the clay. They find it on the eastern side 
of an ant-hill, the emblem of the mother-mountain, and the 
horse is made to step on it T . The sacrificer digs up this 
lump and puts it on a lotus leaf, sacred to Indra as the 
growing water-plant, a plant-parent of the sons of the rivers. 
This is placed on a black antelope skin and addressed in 
three Gayatrl stanzas of seventy-two syllables 2 , as conse- 
crated by the Atharvans as their son, the sun-priest Dadhiank, 
the god of the horse's head of the eleven-months year, and 
Pathya, the sun-bull, who makes his annual journey (pathi) 
through the ecliptic star-path of the sun 3. He takes the 
clay in the black antelope skin to the fire, where he moistens 
it with the resin of the Palasha-tree (Butea frondosa), and 
mixes it with goat's hair, thus consecrating it to the parent- 
tree and star-gods of the Pole Star age 4. He dedicates the 
clay which is to make the bottom of the pan to Makha, the 
fighting god of the head of the sun-horse, and makes it four 
square. The fire-pan thus made is consecrated at the new- 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vi. 3, 1, 25 — 30, vi. 3, 2, 1 — 10, vi. 3, 3, I — 9; 
S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 197 — 200, 203 — 206, 207. 

2 Rg. vi. 16, 13, 14, 15. 

3 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vi. 4, 2, 1 — 5, vi. 5, 1, 1 — 4 ; S.B.E., vol. xli, 
pp. 217, 218, 229, 230. 

4 Ibid., vi. 5, 2-1 ff. ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 233 ff. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 497 

moon of Cheit (March — April). Inside it is placed a layer 
of powdered hemp {Cannabis Indicd), the inspiring bhang 
or hashish used by the Athravans or fire-priests of the 
Zendavesta, which is covered with a layer of powdered 
Mufija or sugar-cane grass, of which the Brahmins' year- 
girdles are made. He puts it on a fire lit with thirteen 
kindling sticks, the thirteen months of the alternative 
measurement of this year r . 

When the fire-pan is ready, the sacrificer sews the gold 
plate with twenty-one knobs into a black antelope skin, and 
hangs it round his neck with a triple hempen cord so that 
it hangs over his navel. He then places the fire inside 
the fire-pan on a throne (dsandi) made of Udumbara wood 
[Ficus glomeratd) covered with treble cords of reed grass 
and smeared over with clay, and carries the pan in a net, 
the star net of the zodiacal year. And this throne, with 
its four feet and four sides, the netting and sling of the gold 
plate, the pan-fire and the gold plate itself signify, as the 
author of Brahmana expressly tells us, the thirteen months 
of this year 2 . The sacrificer first stands with his face to the 
North-east and afterwards to the South-east, where the sun 
rose at the summer and winter solstices, and invokes the 
gods of the two solstitial seasons 3. 

The sun thus born is the sun Hiranya-garbha, he of 
the golden {hiranya) womb (garbha), born of fhe twenty- 
one and seventeen kindling verses of this year's new-year 
fires 4. He represents a different aspect of the Deity from 
that conveyed by the name Hiranyahasta, the god of the 
golden hand (hasta), the sun-god of the five-day weeks, 
born of the bounteous giver (Puramdhi), the Soma cloud- 
bird, and the sexless father of the Pole Star age 5. This 



1 Eggeling, Sat. Bra/i., vi. 6, i, 23, 24, vi. 6, 3, 7, 16; S.B.E., vol. xli. 
pp. 251, 252, note I, 25S — 260. 

1 Ibid., vi. 7, 1 — 19, 2S ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 265—269, 272. 

3 Ibid., vi. 7, 2, I, 9; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 272, 280. 

4 Ibid., vi. 2, 2, 3 — 5 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 172. 
s Rg. i. 116, 13, iv. 27, 2, 3. 

K k 



498 History and Chronology 

sun-god Hiranya-garbha is also the son of Prajapati, called 
Kumara, the ninth of his forms *, the sun-god of the fire- 
altar, symbolised in the year-plan of nine divisions, illustrat- 
ing, as explained in Chapter VII. p. 484, the thirteen-months 
year of India and China. 

The eighth of these successive forms, of which Kumara 
is the ninth, is Ishana, that is to say the son of the god Isha 
or Gan-isha, who, as we have seen, entered the womb of the 
mother of the Buddha when he was conceived as the sun- 
physician. This eighth god is thus the son of Gan-isha, and 
his predecessor, the seventh form of the creator of time, was 
Mahan Deva, the moon-god, the male crescent moon Soma. 
Hence in this descent Kumara, the boy, is the equivalent 
of Rahulo, the little Rahu, the son of the Buddha as the sun- 
physician, and of the eleventh Then, the mother-goddess of 
the eleven-months year, called Bhudda Kaccana, the golden 
saint, that is the mother with the golden womb. 

This young sun-god of the nine forms is the god of the 
year of Solomon's seal of nine divisions formed by the union 
of two triangles enclosed in a circle. This 
was stolen from him by Sakhr, the wet (sak) 
god, king of the White Jinn dwelling in the 
North and owning the sun-mare, the equivalent 
of Sigurd's Grani. This god of the North 
came Southward to fight the black Jinn of the South, the 
sun-fish Salli-manu or Solomon, and to slay him in his 
winter house. He found the sun-god, the young sun born 
at the winter solstice, absent, and his kingdom was ruled 
by Aminah, the faithful, the moon-nurse of the young sun- 
god, during his journey through the thirty stars. While 
Sakhr, who stole the year-ring from Aminah, usurped his 
throne, Solomon, the young sun-god, wandered as a beggar, 
like the outcast sun Odusseus, and became cook to the king 
of Ammon, who was, as we have seen, Nahash the Great 
Bear constellation. He eloped with Na'uzah, the king's 
daughter, the morning-star, and when boiling a fish found 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Bra/i., vi. 1, 3, 8 — 20; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 159, 160. 




of the Myth-Making Age. 499 

inside it his year-ring, which Sakhr had thrown into the sea 
and which the fish had swallowed I . This year-ring of the 
fish-sun-god rising from the constellation Pisces has become 
the Fisherman's ring of marriage placed on the finger of 
each Pope at his consecration and broken at his death. The 
magic sign of nine depicted on it is the topmost keystone 
of the vaulted temple of eight sides, the Pantheon of the 
ruling god of time, the heaven's vault, symbolised on the 
last begging bowl of the Buddha who had become immortal 
and omnipotent as the never-dying sun who pursues his 
course through the heavens without resting or delegating 
his powers to a succcessor reborn from him each year. The 
sign of the interlocked triangles of Solomon's seal is a sacred 
symbol on monuments of the Bronze Age 2 , and must date 
from the epoch of this year, which began, as we have seen, 
with the new-moon of Cheit (March — April) at the vernal 
equinox, when the sun was in Gemini, the ruling constel- 
lation of this age, that is about 6200 B.C. This is the 
Masonic sign of the Royal Arch. 

B. The Vajapeya sacrifice of this year. 

The Vajapeya sacrifice, which gives us the fullest account 
of the history of this year, is said in the Brahmanas to be 
that offered by the supreme centre ruler of a circle of sub- 
ordinate kings 3. Hence it is one instituted at a late period 
of national development, when confederacies of small states, 
formed by the union of united provinces and villages governed 
by the iron discipline of their hereditary rules and customs, 
were controlled by a supreme lawgiver who maintained peace 
and regulated trade over a large area, such as those of the 
seven united kingdoms of India with Jambu-dwipa in the 

1 Burton, Arabian Nights, ' The Adventures of Balukeya,' p. 263 ; ' The 
Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni,' vol. i. p. 38, note 6, 'Aladdin, or the 
Wonderful Lamp,' vol. x. p. 49, note 2 ; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric 
Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., p. 295 ff. 

2 Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, chap. x. p. 378. 

3 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 1, 2, 13, 14; S.B.E., vol. x!i. p. 4. 

K k 2 



500 History and Chronology 

centre and the seven of Iran with the centre in Elam Shu- 
shan, called in the Zendavesta Hvaniratha, the land of light 
or KhvanTras J . The conception of these seven kingdoms 
is one belonging to this age, when seven first became the 
time unit. 

According to the account of the installation of the conquer- 
ing sun-god, the universal ruler as given in the Brahmanas, 
the control of this year was retained by Brihaspati, the Pole 
Star god, who appointed Savitri, the sun-god, as his work- 
ing representative, the supreme impeller (pra-savitri) 2 of 
this year of Prajapati {Orion). The first special ceremony 
inaugurating the birth of this imperial year was the drawing 
of the five Vajapeya cups for its five seasons. These are the 
five cups of the evening libation. At it was chanted the 
Arbhava pavamana Stotra of seventeen verses in the five 
metres, Gayatri, Kakubh, Ushnih, Anushtubh, and Jagatl, all 
of which, as we have seen, represent time measurements. 
Thus this year was conceived to be one uniting and making 
use of all previous epochs 3 under the rule of Indra the eel- 
god parent of the sons of the rivers. 

These five cups or seasons are called in the ritual of the 
Madhyandina or Mid-day Soma feast, the Shukra, Manthin, 
Agrayana, Marutvatlya, and Ukthya. They are specially 
connected with Indra, who is summoned first to the sacrifice. 
The Shukra cup is called after him as the cup of the god 
Sak, and it and the Manthin cup are said in the Brahmanas 
to be offered to the gods Shanda and Marka 4. These, as 
I have shown elsewhere, mean the crescent and full-moon 5, 
the moons sacred to this year, and the course of the year 
signified by these five cups is marked by the third cup, the 
Agrayana, which is that of the firstfruits offered at the end 



1 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendidad Fargard, xix. 39 ; Farvardin Yasht, 
xxviii. ; S.B.E., vol. iv. p. 216, notes 1 and 6, xxiii. p. 220, note I. 

2 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 1, 1, 4, 15, 16; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 2, 5. 

3 Ibid., iv. 3, 3, 2, iv. 2, 5, 21, 22 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 315, note 2, 332. 
* Ibid., iv. 2, i, 1—4; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 278, 279. 

5 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., pp. 243, 244. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 50 1 

of the rainy season, and the cup of the autumn season 
ending with the winter solstice on the last day of the month 
Agrahan (November — December). Thus these five cups 
denote a year of five seasons, beginning with the Shukra 
or hot season, followed by the Manthin the rains, Agrayana 
the autumn, Marutvatiya the winter, and the cup of the 
shining {uktha) sun the spring. The New Year's cups of 
this year celebrate the victory of Indra or Shukra over the 
Vritra or enclosing snake in the contest with the Ahishuva 
or swelling cloud-serpent described in Chapter VII. p. 431. 
In this battle he was accompanied by the seven Maruts, 
the seven star-mothers of the Great Bear to whom the Marut- 
vatiya cup of winter is offered in the services, and it was after 
his victory that the cup of the victorious spring-sun, called 
the Mahendra cup of the Great Indra, was offered I . 

It is after the offering of these five cups to the gods of the 
seasons of the year that the most distinctive part of the Vaja- 
peya ceremonies begins. Two mounds were raised in the 
Soma consecrated ground, one at the West and the other at 
the East end of the Soma cart placed in the centre of the 
space thirty-six steps long, from East to West between the 
Sadas, the priest's house and the Uttara-vedi. The Adh- 
varyu, the ceremonial priest, places himself between the cart 
and the West mound looking westward, and the Neshtri 
priest of Tvashtar god of the year of two seasons, and 
of the female mother-goddesses between the cart and the 
East mound looking eastwards. The Neshtri is directed 
to buy Parisrut, apparently the rice-beer usually drunk by 
the Mundas and other aboriginal and semi-aboriginal races, 
for a piece of lead from a long-haired man of the primitive 
tribes who had not cut his hair according to the orthodox 
Soma tonsure, which required all the hair except the top- 
knot or pig- tail to be shaved. He and the Adhvaryu offer 
together one after the other seventeen cups, the Adhvaryu 
offering cups of the orthodox Tryashira mixture of Indra, 

Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. 3, 3, 1 — 19 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp 331 — 340. 



So2 History and Chronology 

made of milk, sour milk, barley and running water, and 
the Neshtri cups of Parisrut or Sura. The Soma cups are 
offered above and the Sura below the axle, and the 
cups after being offered are placed on the West and East 
mounds. The whole number of thirty-four cups is said to 
be a sacrifice to the thirty-three gods of the months of the 
eleven-months year, and to Prajapati, the god of this year, 
the thirty-fourth god x of the sun-horse, whose thirty-four 
ribs were offered, as we shall see directly, at the Ashvamedha 
sacrifice 2 . 

Thus the ritual of the Vajapeya and of this seventeen- 
months year is clearly deduced from the previous year of 
eleven months, and it is intended as a means of consolidating 
a reconcilement between the unorthodox worshippers of the 
gods of the eleven-months year and the sun worshippers of the 
year of fifteen months. That this union between the Kathi or 
Hittites of the eleven-months year and the sun worshippers 
of that of fifteen months was accomplished by the men of 
this epoch, is proved by the initial sacrifices in the ortho- 
dox ritual of the" Soma sacrifice to the sun-god, the crown- 
ing sacrifice of Hindu theology. These are a cake on eleven 
potsherds for Agni and Vishnu, and rice gruel for Aditi 
and her eight sons, including the eighth, the Martanda, or 
dead egg, who was, as we have seen in Chapter VII. p. 425, 
the sexless sun-god Bhishma 3. These are offered with the 
seventeen kindling verses appropriate to this year, and 
they are uttered in the low whisper with which Prajapati 
was addressed before the chants of the later ritual were 
introduced. 

The horse-sacrifice, described in the Rigveda is the same 
as that offered at the Vajapeya festival opening this year. 
In the hymn depicting it we are told that thirty-four ribs 
are to be cut from the horse answering to the thirty-four 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., v. I, 2, 10 — 18 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 8— II ; Hewitt, 
Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iii., p. 242. 

2 Rg. i. 162, 18. 

3 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iii. 1, 3, 1 — 6 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 12, 13. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 503 

cups of Soma and Sura offered in the Vajapeya ritual. Also 
the Vedic horse-sacrifice begins with the offering of a goat 
to Indra and Pushan, the latter being the god called Praja- 
pati in the Brahmana ritual. Also the sacrifices are conducted 
by seven priests and there are seven gods invoked in the Vedic 
hymn, t the gods of the seven days of the week of this year. 
These gods Mitra, Varuna, Aryaman, Ayu, Ribhuksan and 
the Maruts, are the counterparts of the Brahmana gods to 
whom the Arbhava Pavamana is chanted. These are Indra, 
his two horses, Pushan, Sarasvati, Mitra, Varuna 1 . Also 
the Vedic ritual of the sacrifice of the sun-horse is further 
proved to be especially connected with this year for the 
hymn describing it, Rg. i. 162, is one of the series of twenty- 
four hymns, Rg. i. 140 — 164, the twenty-four days of the 
months of the fifteen-months year, ascribed to Dirgha-tamas, 
the long darkness (tamas), father of Kakshlvat, the year-god 
of the eleven-months year, and the Apr! hymn in this col- 
lection is of thirteen instead of the eleven stanzas of the 
other Apn hymns. 

After the offering of the thirty-four cups at the Vajapeya 
sacrifice, the Adhvaryu draws a cup, called the Madhu-graha 
or honey-cup, in a golden vessel, the golden bowl given 
to the Buddha by Sujata, and places it among the Soma 
cups, and then he offers the Ukthya and Dhruva cups. 
These are the cups of the shining sun (uktha) and the 
steadfast Pole Star 2 . These cups in the full Soma sacrifice 
to the sun-god of the twelve-months years are the eighth and 
ninth 3 of the ten cups offered, of which the tenth and last is 
that offered to the Ashvins, the stars Gemini. They, as we 
have seen in Chapter VII. pp. 391, 392, were first made par- 
takers of Soma at the wedding of Chyavana and Su-konya, 
and their cup is called the Madhu-graha, or honey-cup 



1 Rg. i. 162, 1 — 3, 5 — iS ; Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. 2, 5, 22; S.B.E., 
vol. xxvi. p. 315. 

- Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. I, 2, 19 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 11. 

3 Ibid., iv. 2, 3, I— 18, iv. 2, 4, 1—24; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 292—305. 



5C4 History and Chronology 

of which they got the secret from Dadhiank, the god of 
the horse's head of the eleven-months year J . 

There is a further and very significant ceremony con- 
nected with this honey-cup of the Ashvins. The Adhvaryu 
and sacrificer, took it out and gave it to one of the 
chariot drivers in the chariot-race that followed the sacri- 
fice, either a Vaishya or trader or a Rajanya or warrior. 
As soon as he received it the Neshtri stepped round 
from the East of the Soma cart and gave him all the 
seventeen Sura cups in exchange for it, and then took it 
back to the Adhvaryu. This ceremony shows the consum- 
mation of the union between the earlier aboriginal and semi- 
aboriginal races and the northern worshippers of the white 
horse of the sun 2 . 

In the ritual of the sacrifice the offering of victims follows 
that of the libation cups. These are a he-goat to Agni, with 
a chant of twelve stanzas. Two he-goats to the Ukthya 
god Indra-Agni, with fifteen stanzas, and two he-goats and 
a ram, with sixteen chants to Indra, and these included a 
record of earlier time reckonings in the twelve stanzas for 
the twelve months of Orion's year, and the fifteen and 
sixteen recall the year of fifteen-months and eight-day weeks. 

To these six victims, the gods of the early six-days week, 
is added the seventh, the special Vajapeya victim, a goat 
offered to Sarasvati, the river-mother-goddess with the Vaja- 
peya hymn of seventeen stanzas. The last victim offered 
in this series of sacrifices is ;a spotted barren cow offered to 
the victorious Maruts, the seven Maruts, the mother-stars 
of the Great Bear, who rejoiced over the victory of their son, 
the newly-installed sun-god, whose victory extinguished their 
rules. Finally, seventeen grey he-goats are offered to Praja- 
pati 4. The year-god Prajapati, to whom these victims are 
offered, is, as we are specially told in the Brahmanas, the god 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iv. I, 5, 16—18 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 276, 277, 

2 Ibid., v. 1, 5, 28 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 29. 

3 Ibid., v. 1, 3, 1—3, iv. 4, 2, 17, iv. 5, 3, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. II— 13, 
xxvi. p. 368, note 2 — 370, 397, note 2, 398. 

4 Ibid., v. 1, 3, 7—12; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 14—16. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 505 

called Ka or Who. This is the name given to Prajapati, 
the creator of all things, in each of the ten stanzas of 
Rg. x. 121, the Vedic hymn showing the deepest sense of the 
mystery of creation and of its unknown author. It is 
repeated in the offering and initiatory formulae of the ritual 
of the worship of this father-god of the young sun Hiranj^a- 
garbha, born of the golden womb J . The inner meaning of 
the name given in this later ritual to the god who was once 
the sun-deer Orion is explained in a parable telling us that 
the key to the mystery is given in the Arka or Shining {ark) 
plant {Calotropis gigantea). The teacher explains that in 
this plant is the hidden soul of life from which all things are 
born conveyed to it by the wind and the rain. This is the 
germ of life which, though unseen, invisible and intangible, 
is the unknown power whence the living-fire Agni is pro- 
duced to create plants, animals and men. This divine being 
is known by the name of Ka who, and it is to him as Vayu 
Niyutvat, the shut-in wind, the bearer of the Ka, that the 
white goats are sacrificed in this ritual 2 . The victims offered 
are bound to an eight-sided sacrificial post seventeen cubits 
long, showing that it represents a year of seventeen months ; 
for, according to the Brahmana, the length of the stake and 
of the sacrificer's year should coincide, and a thirteen-cubits 
stake is prescribed for the thirteen-months year, and fifteen 
for that of fifteen-months 3. It has a head-piece of a cake 
made of wheaten dough. The sacrificer and his wife, who 
is robed by the Neshtri in a skirt made of Kusha grass, 
ascend the post by a ladder, and proclaim from the top that 
they have become Prajapati's children through their union 
with the sacred creating-wheat on the top of the post. The 
sacrificer then receives seventeen bags of salt wrapped in 
the leaves of the Ashvattha-tree {Fiats religiosd). He then 
descends and sits, while the sacrifice is being offered, on an 



1 Eggeling, Sat. Brak., vi. 2, 2, 5, 12; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 173, 176. 

2 Ibid., x. 3, 4, 2—5 ; S.B.E., vol. xli v. pp. 333—336. 

3 Ibid., iii. 6, 4, 24 — 26; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 166, 167. 



506 History and Chronology 

Udumbara [Ficus glomeratd) throne, over which a goat-skin 
is spread *. 

C. The Chariot-races of the sun-god of this year. 

After the sacrifice of the victims the chariot-race is run. 
The sacrificer yokes to the chariot first two horses, yoking 
the right-hand horse first ; to these he adds a third beside the 
right-hand horse and a fourth in front as leader, and offers 
seventeen platters of gruel made of wild rice to Brihaspati, 
the Pole Star god 2 . 

In the ritual for the consecration of the race-course it is 
ordered that seventeen drums are to be placed along the 
edge of the altar, and that an archer of the Rajaniya or 
warrior caste is to shoot seventeen arrow ranges from the 
Northern edge of the Uttara Vedi or Northern altar between 
the Utkara, the mound formed by the earth dug out in 
constructing the altar and the Chatvala pit, whence the 
Ashvins were invited to drink Soma with the gods. These 
are both to the North-east of the consecrated Soma ground, 
and hence the race-course was to lie to the North-east 
of the pillar, which, like that at Stonehenge, marks the 
rising point of the sun of the summer solstice, and this is 
exactly the position of the old race-course at Stonehenge. 
At the end of the range of the seventeenth arrow the archer 
planted a branch of the Udumbara-tree (Ficus glomeratd), 
of which the sacred plough and the house-pole of the Sadas 
or house of the gods in the Soma ground were made. It 
was round this goal that the sacrificer's chariot and the 
sixteen four-horse chariots accompanying it were to race. 
While the race was being run a Brahmin was to stand on 
a cart-wheel placed on a post as high as his navel near the 
altar, and to chant the prescribed hymn while the wheel was 
made to revolve sunwise 3. Thus the race was to represent 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., v. 2, I, 1 — 25 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 29 — 36. 

2 Ibid., v. 1, 4, 1 — 14; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 19 — 22. 

3 Ibid., v. 1, 5, 1 — 14; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 22, note 1, 23, note 1, 24, note 
I, 25, note 1. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 507 

the contest between the months of the year marking the 
annual course of the sun going from the South-west to the 
North-east between the winter and summer solstice, and 
returning from the North-east position of the summer sol- 
stitial sun to its winter home. 

A complete parallel to this race, but one in which the year 
is measured by seasons and not by months, is to be found 
in the chariot-race at the games instituted by Achilles at the 
funeral of Patroclus. Patroclus, as I have shown in Chapter 
VII. p. 490, was the sun-physician, and he was followed 
at his death by the sun-god of the new year and epoch 
which was to succeed him. It is the contest for precedence 
as the ruler of the opening season of this year of five seasons 
which is depicted in the chariot-race described by Homer *. 
There are five champions contending each for his own season 
among the season cups, and these seasons are not the 
European seasons of Greece, but those of India, whence this 
as well as so much more of the Greek mythology was derived. 
These were : I. Eumelus, son of Admetus, called Hades 
Admetos (at,Si]s ciS^tjtos), the untamed god of the lower 
world, whose wife Alkestis, the sun-maiden, went down like 
Istar to the realms of death to save his life as the dying 
sun, whence she was brought back by Herakles, the sun-god 
of the age when the Pole Star was in the constellation 
Hercules. He was the year-god of the rainy season, the 
god who sought his home in the South. II. Diomedes, the 
counsellor (fifjSos) of Zeus, son of Tydeus, the hammering 
(tud) god, the Northern smith, the conquering-god of summer, 
the Indra who slew Vritra at the summer solstice. He drove 
the two horses he had taken from zEneas, which were two 
of the six which Anchises stole from Laomedon, substituting 
mares for the horses he took, so that of the twelve year-horses 
which Zeus gave to Tros in exchange for Ganymede, who 
was, as I have shown in Chapter IV. p. 145, the cupbearer 
of the gods and god of the winter season, six were mortal 

' Homer, Jliad, xxiii. 287 — 538. 



508 History and Chronology 

mares and six immortal steeds. Two of these immortal 
sun-horses had become the property of Diomede, who took 
them from ^Eneas, son of Anchises, who was the grandson 
of Assarakos, the god of the bed and brother of Ganymede r . 
III. Menelaus, husband of the immortal Helen, sister of 
Polydeukes, the rain-twin and the tree-mother (SeuSpiTts) 
of the Dorians of Rhodes. He drove the pair of steeds 
of the original Twin-gods, the mare ^Ethiope belonging to 
Agamemnon, husband of the other female twin, Clytem- 
nestra, sister of Kastor, the pole of Ka, and his own horse 
Podargus. He was the god of the autumn season, originally 
sacred to the Twins. IV. Antilochus, son of Nestor of 
Pylos, the city of the gates (jrvXai) of the Garden of God, 
the god of spring. V. Merione, born of the thigh (^7]pia) } 
the son of Molos {war), half-brother of Idomeneus, the 
leader of the Cretan archers 2 , the god of the bow, whence 
the winter-arrow was shot that pierced the mother-cloud- 
bird, the god of winter, said by Homer to be the equal of the 
warrior Ares, the god of war Enyo. He was the repre- 
sentative of the Thigh-born sun-god of the fifteen-months 
year. 

The course was guarded by Phcenix, the year-bird of the 
date-palm-tree ((poivif;), which rises yearly from its own 
ashes as the ever-living sun-bird. He is called the servant 
of Peleus, the god of the Potter's clay, father of Achilles, 
and was the counterpart of Achilles himself, the independent 
sun-god who steered his own course through the heavens 
without being led by the moon-god or watched by the 
guardian-star of the boundaries, the steerer of the sun-ship 
Argo. The contest bears a close analogy to that of the 
Kauravyas and Pandavas ; in both the victorious season 
among the five into which the year was divided was the god 
of the summer season ending at the summer solstice. This 
was the season of the Pandava Bhima, the son of Maroti, 



1 Homer, Iliad, v. 265—279, 323—327, xx. 232—240, xxiii. 291, 292. 

2 Ibid,, ii. 651. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 509 

the tree-ape-god, who fought with the striking-club or tree- 
hammer, whence the father of Diomedes took his name ; 
and the Kauravya leader Duryodhana, whom he finally 
vanquished and slew, and both of whose thighs he broke, 
was the thigh-god of the eleven-months year, who appears 
in this horse-race as Eumelus, whose chariot was overthrown 
and he himself maimed, but who subsequently was, like his 
Pandava prototype, Arjuna, god of the rainy season during 
the Kauravya war, judged to be in merit next to the sun- 
god. Arjuna from being the god of the rainy season became 
the god of the month Phalgun (February — March) ending 
at the vernal equinox, when this seventeen-months year 
began, and the god who drove the white horses of the sun- 
chariot behind Parikshit, the sun-horse who started on his 
course on the 1st of Cheit (March — April). As a recogni- 
tion of the changed position of the once ruling rain-god, the 
Mahendra, the Great Indra, Eumelus received from Achilles 
a brazen corslet surrounded by a band of glittering tin, which 
had belonged to the Paeonian Asteropaios, the star {aster) 
chief, son of Pelagon, the stream {Peleg) god, the parent 
river, the Thracian Axios and leader of the Thracian 
Paeonians, whose god was the sun-physician (iraidv), and 
who, as we shall see presently, measured time by the 
thirteen-months year, the predecessor and equivalent of this 
seventeen-months year I . In other words he was proclaimed 
as the sun-physician, the guardian of the young sun-god 
of this year of the chariot-race, who, as Rahulo in the form 
of Parikshit, had superseded his father. 

The course over which the race was run, as described 
by Nestor in his advice to his son Antilochus, was one 
round a Avithered oak or pine trunk a fathom high, marking 
the tomb of an ancient chief, which was almost certainly 
in races run at Troy the tomb and altar, that is the dolmen 
of Ilos, marked by the parent wild fig-tree of Troy 2 , the 



1 Homer, Iliad, xxiii. 558—562, xxi. 135—199. 

2 Ibid., xi. 166, 167. 



5ro History and Chronology 

Udumbara-tree of the Indian race-course, and described 
by Homer as standing in the middle of the plain \ This 
decaying tree-pillar, the image of the mother-goddess of 
the tree-trunk, the Indian Drona or Mari-amma. It stood 
between two white stones, the two pillars placed in front 
of all Phoenician temples, the pillars of the two solstices ; 
and between the pillars and the goal there was space enough 
for the chariots to turn as they rounded the latter in their 
returning course, going sunwise from left to right. 

In the beginning of the race Antilochus, the driver 
of the horses of the gates, was first, showing that it 
began in spring under the guidance of the gate-stars 
Gemini ; next was Eumelus, the rainy season ; next after 
him came Menelaus, the autumn, followed by Meriones, 
the winter god of the bow; and last Diomecles the final 
victor. But he caught up the three in front of him, while 
Eumelus passed Antilochus ; and in the returning course, 
after passing the goal he was immediately behind Eumelus, 
when Apollo Smintheus, the mouse Apollo of Troy, caused 
him to lose his whip, and thus cease to gain on Eumelus 
as he could no longer urge on his steeds. But Athene, 
the tree-mother, the goddess Pallas of the seed-husk {Pales), 
restored it to him and secured him the victory by over- 
turning the chariot of Eumelus. In the final order of the 
competition Diomedes was first, Antilochus second, Mene- 
laus third, Meriones fourth, and Eumelus, who was ultimately 
judged to be second, as I have already explained, last ; and 
he received the prize given to the follower and guardian 
of the sun-god. 

The other prizes are also significant. The winner received 
a female slave, the sun-maiden of the eleven-months year, 
bearing a cauldron holding twenty-two measures, its half- 
months. The second a mare with a mule foal, also a remin- 
iscence of the lunar-solar year of the male crescent moon 
and the sun descended from the sun-ass. The third a 

1 Homer, Iliad, xi. 166, 167. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 511 

cauldron holding four measures, the four seasons of the 
eleven-months year. The fourth two talents of gold ; and 
the fifth a double cup, marking him as the year cup-bearer 
and guardian of the seasons of the solstitial-year. This was 
given to Nestor, the ancient warder of the Gates, father 
of Antilochus, the god of spring, recipient of the mule foal, 
which he handed to Noemon, the gnomon-stone r . 

In the succeeding contests, Odusseus won the foot-race, 
beating the Locrian Ajax Oileus, the swiftest runner of 
the Greeks, and Antilochus. But the victory of Odusseus, 
like that of Diomede, was gained by the aid of Athene, who 
caused Ajax to stumble and thus win only the moon-ox, 
the second prize. 

The cup which Odusseus won was that of the ruling sun- 
god of the three contending seasons, the cup of Thoas, the 
king of the Tauric Chersonesus, who was, as we have seen 
(p. 93) the Phoenician Tammuz, the Akkadian Dumu-zi Orion, 
in short Odusseus himself in his first form as a year-ruler. 
He now won this cup of the leading season as the ruling 
sun-god of this new sun-year, that of seventeen and thir- 
teen lunar months 2 . 

These two winning year-gods who won the races of the 
sun-year had a special connection with this thirtecn-months 
year. Both were favourites of Athene, the tree-mother of 
the South, and uniter of the Northern and Southern races, 
and the tent of Odusseus, as that of the centre star Orion 
was in the centre of the Grecian camp 3. The thirteen-months 
year was that of the Northern Thracians, and it was Dio- 
medes and Odusseus who, under the guidance of the deceit- 
ful spy Dolon, sent by Hector, found the year-king Rhesus 
sleeping in the centre of his guard of twelve surrounding 
months. These thirteen were slain by Diomede, and the 
horses of their year-chariot were taken by Odusseus 1. 

1 Homer, Iliad, xxiii. 262—270, 612—617. : ' Ibid., xxiii. 739 

3 Ibid., xi. 5, 6. •' Ibid., x. 471—501. 

* 



512 History and Chronology 

D. Odusseus and other Greek year-gods rulers of the 
seventeen and thirteen-months year. 

It was as a god born of the year of thirteen lunar months 
that Odusseus appeared in Ithaca as the returning pauper 
sun-god, for he came from the land of the Phaeacians, that 
is, of the dusky {^alt]) land of night, ruled by twelve kings, 
whose over-lord was Alkinoos the thirteenth, and it was 
they who sent him to Ithaca in their year - ship with fifty- 
two oarsmen, the fifty-two weeks of the year I . The story 
of his arrival at Scheria, the Phseacian country, clearly shows 
him to be a risen sun-god, the ruler of the year. He came 
from Ogygia, the island of Calypso, the hidden (KaXvvTco) 
goddess, where he had remained eight years 2 . He was 
sent from thence to Scheria at the command of Hermes, 
the god of the sun-gnomon-pillar, where he was to arrive 
on the twentieth day 3, and whence he was to be sent to 
Ithaca. He thus came as the sexless son-god, hidden in 
the era of the sun-god of the eight-days week, Poseidon, 
the snake-god of the trident-year and owner of the horses of 
the sun, was, on his return from the Southern land of the 
Ethiopians, aware of the coming of this new sun-god armed 
with the cap of darkness (KaXvirTpr]), the golden year-girdle, 
and silver white (apyvfaos) tunic of the conquering sun of 
the eight-days week measured by the two lunar crescents of 
the double axe (iriXeicvs) of the Carian Zeus which he carried. 
These arms, marking him as the sun-god, he had got from 
Calypso. Poseidon fearing this new usurper of the rule 
of heaven raised a tempest which wrecked the raft of 
Odusseus, the raft of the transition period of the year of 
the eight-days week, immediately after he, on the eighteenth 
day of his voyage, had arrived in sight of Phseacia 4. He 
was saved by Ino, the daughter of Kadmus, in the likeness 
of a sea-gull. She was, as we have seen in Chapter VII. 
p. 397, the mother of Melicertes, the sun-god Melquarth, with 

1 Homer, Odyssey, viii. 390, 391, 35, 36, 48. 2 Ibid., vii. 253—263. 

3 Ibid., v. 34—38. 4 ibid., v. 229—236, 277—318. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 5 1 3 

whom she leaped into the sea, whence he was conveyed 
by his mother as the dolphin-mother-goddess Tirhatha to 
the mother - pine - tree, whence he was to be born as the 
sun-god son of the virgin fir-tree. She gave to Odusseus 
the magic sail, the kredemnon J , like the upright fin of the 
dolphin, which gave it, in the Hindu flood story of Manu, 
the name of the horned fish. This wing of the sea-bird 
and sea-dolphin, he put on after he had taken off the dress 
of the conquering sun-god, given him by Calypso, and thus 
after two days' tossing in the sea, which was finally calmed 
by Athene, it brought the naked sun-god Odusseus to the 
Phaeacian coast, where he made himself a bed under the 
two parent olive-trees of the sun-mother Athene, the olive- 
tree-mother, whose tree, as we have seen, made his olive-tree 
bed of the sun-god in Ithaca. These trees were the wild 
olive-tree ((jjvXlr)) and the cultivated olive (iXaia), and it 
was under these trees that he awoke as the new sun-god 
of this year on the twenty-first day of its first month passed 
in the voyage from Ogygia. Here he was met by Nausicaa, 
the sun-maiden, who re-robed him and brought him to the 
palace of her father Alkinoos and her mother Arete 2 . 
. In this story we see clearly that the new sun-god of 
this year, the victor in the chariot and foot races at the 
funeral games, belonged to a different race from that in 
which he was born, in what the Buddha of the Jataka, or 
birth stories, would call his former births. For it was not 
till Odusseus had lost the garments of the sun-god of the 
year of the eight-days week, who was slain by the trident 
of Poseidon at the end of the epoch of his rule, the im- 
penetrable tunic, the cup of darkness and the double 
axe, that he became the naked sun-god of the new era, 
the sun-god who rose from the salt-waters of regeneration 
to be the sun-god born of the olive-tree, the immortal ruler 
of time. 

1 For further evidence as to the history of the year-god Odusseus, god of 
the path (oSos) of Time, told in the mythology of Ino and the kredemnon, 
see Appendix C. 

2 Homer, Odyssey, v. 333— 35°. 372, 373, 3S2— 388, 459, 460, 476—493- 

L 1 



514 History and Chronology 

It is to this age, when Poseidon was the enemy of the sun- 
god of the post-lunar age, and ruler of time during the lunar- 
solar epoch when he owned the horses of the sun, that the 
thirteen-months year of Otus and Ephialtes must be referred. 
They were the reputed sons of Aloeus, the god of the salt 
sea, the son of Poseidon, who Avas also the father of his 
twin sons, the god of the thirteen-months year. Their 
description in Homer marks them as dating, like their 
counterparts the twin stars Gemini, from the age of the 
cycle-year. For when they were nine years old they were 
nine cubits broad across the shoulders, and three fathoms, 
three times nine, or twenty-seven cubits high. They rebelled 
against the gods, declaring they would make a path to heaven 
by piling mountains on mountains, that is to say, they 
changed in their thirteen-months year the course of the 
year path which led to heaven, and made it no longer the 
path of the sun, but that marked by the new and full-moons. 
Thus in this year they bound Ares, the ploughing {ar) god 
of increase, in chains for thirteen months, but they were 
slain before they attained manhood by Apollo, that is to 
say their system of year-measurement was rejected. Ares 
was released from his captivity by Hermes, the god of the- 
gnomon -pillar, who was warned of his captivity by the 
step-mother of Ares, Eeriboia, the mist or cloud-goddess I . 

This captivity of Ares, brought about by the two giant 
twins born of the salt sea, forms of the constellation Gemini, 
which was, in this age, the guiding station of the sun's entry 
on his yearly circuit of the heavens, appears in a variant 
form in the ballad recited by Demodokos, at the banquet 
in which Alkinoos proclaimed himself the thirteenth and 
chief ruler of Phaeacia, the supreme centre month among 
his twelve subordinate chiefs. Demodokos told how the sun 
warned Hephaistos, the god of the fire-drill, that Aphrodite, 
the fire-socket, the earth-goddess, had deserted him for 
Ares, the ploughing-god of the plough constellation of the 

1 Homer, Odyssey, xi. 305 — 320 ; Iliad, v. 386 — 391. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 515 

Great Bear. He accordingly prepared a web to catch this 
warrior sun-god, described as the fastest runner of the gods, 
and his paramour from which they could not free themselves, 
and summoned the gods to behold them in the year-net 
he had made for them. Hermes and Apollo came together 
with Poseidon, but the sun-god and the god of the gnomon- 
pillar made, in this version of the story, no effort to free 
this sun-dog, to whom dogs were offered as the year-god 
Sirius, and it was at the intercession of Poseidon, who, 
through his twin sons was the creator of the thirteen-months 
year, that Ares was released. The web in which Hephaistos 
bound the warrior year-sun and his paramour, the Aminah 
of the story of Sakhr and Solomon's ring, was clearly the 
year-circle of the lunar phases, which kept the sun from its 
Northern and Southern solstitial paths ; and that this is the 
correct solution is made most probable by Homer's state- 
ment that Ares, when released, went North to Thrace, and 
Aphrodite, who, like Aminah, ruled the South, went to 
Paphos in Cyprus, where the three Charites, the year mother- 
goddesses of the year of three seasons bathed her in the 
regenerating waters of the Southern sea, and re-robed her 
as the sun-mother of the released and ruling-sun z . 

We find also a picture of the sun-god of this era in the 
stories of the marriage of Hippodameia to Pelops, and of the 
battle between the Centaurs and the Lapithae, which took 
place when Hippodameia was wedded to Pirithoos. This 
year-goddess Hippodameia, the tamer of horses, daughter 
of CEnomaus, the only (otvos, Lat. units) measurer, the Pole 
Star god, is another form of the goddess Hippolyte, she who 
is released by horses, wife of Acastus. She is the indepen- 
dent moon-goddess, the Here or mistress who is wedded to 
the sun-god, and her wedding is thus clearly distinguished 
from the wedding of the parent-gods of the year of eight-day 
weeks, when the moon-father-god was married to Suria, the 
sun-maiden. In the chronology of the present year the 

' Homer, Odyssey, viii. 265 — 366. 
L 1 2 



516 History and Chronology 

moon has become the female goddess of the Southern 
nations, and is no longer the male moon of the North, 
while on the other hand the sun has become the ruling 
king of the North born of the Thigh and not the sun-bird 
of the South. 

In the story of the wedding of Pelops to Hippodameia, 
she is won from her father CEnomaus in a race of chariots 
drawn by four horses, like those on the Indian racecourse. 
Pelops won the race by bribing Myrtilus, the charioteer of 
CEnomaus, to take out the linch-pins of his master's chariot, 
and thus he escaped the fate of his thirteen predecessors, who 
were slain by the conquering CEnomaus. In the present, 
race CEnomaus was killed by falling from his broken chariot, 
as Eumelus his counterpart in the race with Diomede 
was also disabled. In the frieze at Olympia depicting the 
preparations for the contest, there are thirteen figures, that 
of Zeus in the centre with six figures on each side of him, 
those of Pelops and his friends on one side, and those of 
CEnomaus and his supporters on the other I . Thus these 
thirteen months are exactly arranged like those in the 
Vedic cosmological hymn, I. 164, 15, with the supreme month 
in the centre, and the six paired months on the two sides. 
In this hymn the central seventh month alone is self-created, 
the others are said to be born by divine ordinance, and 
each discharges the functions alloted to it by the Creator. 
This central month occupies the position assigned to Jaistha 
(May — June) in the ceremonies of this year, for it was on 
its full moon, about the 1st June, that the twenty-one and 
seventeen versed hymns are chanted at the morning and 
mid-day services of the Keshava - panlya or ceremonial 
shaving of the king, who offers the New Year sacrifices. 

This is the month called Krodha in the list of the thirteen 
months of this year, called in the Mahabharata the thirteen 
wives of Kashyapa, father of the Kushite race. They are : 
1. Aditi, 2. Diti, 3. Danu, 4. Kala, 5. Danayu, 6. Sinhika, 

1 Frazer, Patisanias, v. 10, 2, vol. i. p. 250 ; vol. iii. p. 505. 



of the Myth- Ma king Age. 517 

7. Krodha, 8. Pradha, 9. Vishva, 10. Vinata, 11. Kapila* 
12. Muni, 13. Kadru. That Krodha, the central month 
of this year, is one close to the summer solstice is proved 
by the fact that Pradha, the eighth month, is said to be the 
mother of the thirteen Apsarus or water-goddesses, that is 
of the month in which the rains beginning at the summer 
solstice are most violent T . 

The frieze at Elis illustrating the fights between the 
Centaurs and the long-haired Lapithae at the wedding of 
Hippodameia with Pirithous also apparently refers to the 
traditional history of this year. It contains twenty -one 
figures, of which the central is Apollo. He must certainly 
be Apollo Paean, the sun-god of this epoch, the sun-physician 
of the Paeonians, who, as we have seen, measured time by 
the thirteen-months year. On the right of Apollo is a group 
in which Pirithous, the runner (thous) round {peri) the 
circling-sun, the Greek equivalent of the Hindu Parikshit, 
who was king of the Lapithae, defends Hippodameia from 
a Centaur ; and on his left is another group, in which 
Theseus rescues from a Centaur a woman, apparently Hip- 
podameia»'s mother 2 . 

In this battle in which the Centaurs were defeated we see 
a picture of the struggle between the long-haired race of the 
Lapithae, the men from whom the Sura was bought at the 
Vajapeya sacrifice, and the Centaurs, sons of the sun-horse, 
who polled their hair and drank milk till Pholos, the guard- 
ian of the national cask of the waters of life, the sacred tree- 
trunk Drona containing the Soma, opened it for Herakles 
when the water came forth as wine. It was when the vine 
of Dionysos and the Gis-kin or palm-tree, whence Dumu/.i 
was born 3, became the parent-trees in the days of Samlah 
of Masrekah, the vine lands that, according to Pindar, the 
Centaurs "learnt the sparkle of the honey-sweet wine and 



' Mahabhirata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, cxv. pp. 1S5, 187. 

2 Frazer, Pausanias, vol. iii. pp. 516 — 522. 

3 Sayce, Ilibbcrt Lectures for 1SS7, Leel. iv. \>. 23b, note 



5 1 8 History and Chronology 

pushed the milk from their tables 1 ." The stones of this 
series are shown to refer to the question of the sacramental 
drink consumed at the seasonal festivals by the name of 
Pholus. It is the yEolic form of ^o'A.os y\oo$, meaning the 
golden-green, and is an exact translation of the epithet 
Hari-Zairi, used in the Zendavesta to denote Soma. Also 
Pholus is proved to be the Soma-god filling the cups of 
the seasons by the triple flagon (rpikd'yvvov Seiras), the three- 
cupped cup of the three seasons, which he gave to Geryon, 
the Phoenician Charion, the star Orion ruling the year 
of three seasons 2 . The Centaurs were apparently of the 
same race as the milk-drinking Massagetae. who, according 
to Herodotus, worshipped only the sun-god, to whom they 
offered horses 3. They on reaching the country of the 
Lapithae, whose name means the Plunderers or Destroyers 
(lap, Xarratyo, to plunder), the fierce long-haired men of the 
Ugro-Finn race, the Ugrosena of the eleven-months year, 
attacked them, and the war ended in a union between the 
two races, in which the Northern sons of the sun-horse took 
the leading place. Their union is marked in the Vajapeya 
sacrifice by the addition of the pure Soma to the intoxi- 
cating Sura of the long-haired race. But in the contest 
there was developed a belief in a more refined symbolism 
than that of the realistic representations of the gods of 
the Lapithse phallus-worshippers, the linga-worshippers of 
India, called in the Rigveda Sisna-deva, or those whose 
god is the phallus. Hence after the defeat of the Centaurs 
by the Lapithse, when the year of Hippodameia with its 
seven-day weeks was introduced, the Centaur archer-god 
Eurytion, the rainbow-god, was thrown out of doors and 
his nose and ears were cut off 4. That is to say, he was 
made like Melanthios, the goat-herd-god of the suitors whom 

1 Pindar, Frag. 147, Boeckh, ii. 637 ; Meyer, Indo Germainsche Mythen 
Gandharva Kentauria, p. 41. 

2 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i. , Essay vi., pp. 549 — 551. 

3 Herodotus, i. 216 

4 Homer, Odyssey, xxi. 295 — 303. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 5 19 

Odusseus treated in the same way, the featureless sun-gnomon 
pillar, the Hir-men-sul, the great sun-stone of the North ; 
and the pillar-worship of the Phoenicians replaced the idol- 
worship of the lunar solar-era. 

E. The thirteen-montJis year of the Santais, the thirteen 
wives of KasJiyapa and the thirteen Buddhist Theres. 

This year of thirteen months is the sacred year of the 
Santals, and its adoption by them throws a most vivid light 
on its history. They are physically nearly a pure Dravidian 
race, of very dark complexions, with flat noses, large mouths, 
thick lips, black somewhat curly hair and doliko-kephallic 
skulls ; and their traditional history shows that on the 
father's side they were descended from Northern ancestors. 
They call themselves the sons of the wild-goose (hasdu/c), 
and their original settlement in India was, they say, at 
Champa on the Ganges, which was, as we have seen, the 
capital of Kama, king of Anga, and the Angiras priesthood. 
Their chief god is Marung Bum, the great mountain 
(inarung), the equivalent of the mother-mountain-goddess 
Su-bhadra and the Gond mountain-mother Koi or Koh 
{kai-kaia). They trace their descent on the father's side 
from the god Moreko, the peacock (mor) god, one of five 
brothers, the five Pandava brethren called the Bharatas, 
born of the peacock {may lira Hindi nwhr), the totem-god 
of the Bhars and the Maurya or Peacock kings. Their 
maternal ancestors are the two sisters of these brethren, 
Jair Era, goddess of the village-grove {jahir) and Gosain 
Era, the saintly {gosain) goddess. Thus they say that their 
separate nationality dates from the age when the peacock 
with its starry tail became the sacred bird of Here, the moon- 
goddess, and when men began to measure the year by 
the track of the moon and sun through the zodiacal stars. 
They used to sacrifice human victims, and the story of their 
descent shows that they belong to the race of Kansa, the 
goose-son of Ugra-sena, the Bhoja king ; that is to say that 



520 History and Chronology 

their Northern ancestors on the father's side were the Ugro- 
Altaic Finns, who have, as Dr. Sayce tells us, from time 
immemorial used a year of thirteen lunar months, which 
they apparently derived from the Turkic tribes, and who 
introduced the seven-days week among the Akkadians I . 
They brought into Southern Asia their knowledge of metals 
and ores, and their handicrafts as workers in gold and silver, 
leather, fibres and wood. 

The Finn ancestors of the Santals who came to India with 
this influx of artisan immigrants are shown, by the Santal 
customs, to be nearly allied to the patriarchal ancestors 
of the Kandhs of Orissa, as in both tribes property descends 
in the male line. The matriarchal side of Santal descent 
is shown in their marriage ceremonies, in which both bride 
and bridegroom are separately married to a mahua-tree 
(Bassia latifolia), [the tree whence the honey drink of the 
age of the Ashvins was brewed, and in the orgiastic fes- 
tivals with which they celebrate the changes of the seasons, 
especially those of the Sohrai at the winter solstice and 
the Magh festival of January — February. Also one of their 
principal septs is that of the Sarens or descendants of the 
Pleiades, and among the Saren clan the Naiki-Khil Sarens 
are a sect of incipient Levites who are so careful to preserve 
their purity that they will not enter a house where any of 
the inmates are ceremonially unclean, and have a special 
village grove and priest of their own. 

All the Santals, both women and men, worship as family- 
gods the seven Orakbonga, called i. Baspahar, 2. Deswali, 
3. Sas, 4. Goraya, 5. Barpahar, 6. Sarchawdi, 7. Thunta- 
tursa. These seven days of the week are embodiments 
of the mountain {pakar) goddess, the goddess of the village 
grove {des-wali) and the boundary-god {goraya), and most 
probably were originally the seven stars of the Great Bear, 
worshipped as the Seven Sisters by their congeners the 
Rautias 2 , and they are certainly parallel deities to the seven 

1 Sayce, Introduction to the Science of Language, vol. ii. pp. 195, 196. 

2 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Rautia, vol. ii. p. 204. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 521 

communal ghosts worshipped by the Bhuiyas, called Darha, 
Kudra, Kudri, Dano, Pacheria, Haserwar, Pakahi x . Here 
Darha or Dharti, the goddess of the springs, is the Kushika 
mother Gandhari, the Pole Star Vega ; Kudra, is the moon- 
goddess ruling our Monday, and Dano is the Pole Star 
judge, the earlier form of Odin, the god of wisdom ruling 
our Wednesday. 

But though these gods of the seven days are generally 
worshipped openly by both sexes in each family as a survi- 
val from the days when they represented the seven stars of 
the Great Bear, the ritual of the worship of the thirteen 
months of the year called Abge-bongas is preserved as a 
profound secret among the male Santals, their names being 
only known to the head of each family and his eldest son. 
They can only, like Sek Nag, the secret god of the Raj 
Gonds, be worshipped by males, but not like Sek Nag by the 
males of the tribe assembled together, but by the males 
of each family separately, who partake together of the offer- 
ings made. Their names are I. Dhara-sor or Dhara-sanda, 
2. Ketkomkudra, 3. Champa-dena-gurh, 4. Gurhsinka, 5. Lila- 
chandi, 6. Dhanghara, 7. Kudra Chandi, 8. Bahara, 9. Duar- 
seri, 10. Kudraj, 11. Gosain Era, 12. Achali, 13. Deswali. 
Here the thirteenth goddess is the queen of the village grove, 
the mother-tree, the equivalent of Kadru, mother of the Na- 
gas, the thirteenth wife of Kashyapa. But the predominant 
god in the list is the moon-god, especially the centre seventh 
moon-goddess, Kudra-Chandi. In her name we find both 
the Hindu word for moon Chandi and the Finnish Ku, which 
appears in the Finnic Kuta-ma, the Esthonian Ku, Mordvin 
Kua, Ostiak Khoda-j, and in Kuhii, a name for the waning 
moon in the Atharvaveda -, also in Ku-ar, the name of the 
month Ashvayujau (September — October) in Western India. 
It is also noticeable that the names of the two months of 
generation, the tenth Kudraj and the eleventh Gosain Era, 

1 Risley, Tribes and Castes oj Bengal, Bhulyas, vol. i. p. 115. 

2 Lenormant, Chaldaan Magic, p. 304, Atharvaveda, v. S, 47 ; Ludwig, 

Rigveda, vol. iii. p. 189. 



522 History and Chronology 

are masculine and feminine, and denote the marriage of 
the male moon - god, the Soma of the Vedic marriage, 
to the saintly ( gosain) goddess of the mother-tree, sister 
of Jair Era, goddess of the village grove. The name of this 
goddess-mother is the equivalent of the eleventh Buddhist 
Then, Bhudda Kaccani, the Golden Saint *. 

The comparison between the Santal names of these thir- 
teen year-gods and those of the thirteen wives of Kashyapa 
is most interesting, for it shows the hatred with which the 
later Hindus, who had learnt to read and write, regarded the 
year reckoning brought in by the artisan races, who, like the 
Peruvians and ancient Chinese, kept their records by the 
Santal method of knotted cords, the Peruvian Ouipas 2 . 
This feeling is shown by the name Krodha anger, and Krura 
the cruel one, given to the central-goddess of the Kushite 
year, and marks how deeply the memory of their ruthless 
conquest was impressed on the minds of the people, a me- 
mory which has extended far beyond India, and has caused 
the number thirteen to be looked on as unlucky all over 
Europe. 

The evidence as to this thirteen-months year given by its 
adoption as the Santal year and its incorporation into 
Buddhist theology as the year of the thirteen Theris, headed 
by Maha GotamI Pajapati, the sister of the Buddha's mother 
and his nurse, seems to show that this year with its week 
of seven days was first brought to India by the Northern 
artisan races, who settled in the country as conquerors in the 
beginning of the Bronze Age; and that the seventeen- 
months year, into which the seven-days week was incor- 
porated, was one framed by the ritualistic priesthood, who 
tried to unite the two races of the Northern conquerors and 
their Southern predecessors, and to combine the conservative 
tendencies of the races who wished to retain the orgiastic 
festivals and the sacrifices of the earlier epochs with those 

1 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Santals, vol. ii. pp. 225 — 233. 
- Prescott, History of Peru, vol. i. p. 112; Legge, Texts of 'Taoism ; S.B.E., 
vol. xxxix. p. 122. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 523 

of the moral reformers who set their faces against in- 
dulgence in strong drink and the licence of the national 
festivals, and who, under the influence of the Hittite Jain 
teachers, insisted on moral self-discipline. It was these 
reformers who banished strong drink from the Soma sacri- 
fice, and changed the Soma cup from the Sautramani 
cup, described in Chapter VI. pp. 322, 323, made of 
Kusha grass, fruits, malted barley, rice, and millets, mixed 
with spirits and milk into the pure cup of Indra, made of 
sweet and sour milk, barley, and running water. We find 
a similar change in the composition of the Greek sacramental 
cup of Demeter. This called the Kukeon (/cvfcewv) is said 
in the Iliad to be made of barley-meal, grated cheese, and 
Pramnion wine, and to this Circe added honey and magical 
drugs I . But in the hymn to Ceres the wine is left out, and 
it is made of barley-meal (a\cf)iTa), water, and mint, and this 
was the cup drunk at the Eleusinian mysteries 2 . This change 
was brought about by the sons of the date-palm-tree, the 
Tamar of the Jews, the water-drinking race of horsemen 
of the desert who made the cult of the date-palm the • 
national creed of the Babylonians, who in their bas-reliefs 
represent their priest-kings or demi-gods as impregnating 
the mother-palm-tree with the pollen of the male tree. The 
leaders in this belief in the virtues of temperance in drink 
were the tribe called the Banu Hanlfa, meaning they who 
do what is right, to which Abram is said in the Koran to 
have belonged. They called a mixture of dates, butter, and 
dry curds, named Hals, their god, and said that they lived 
by eating him 3. In short, they believed that the life-giving 
spirit of the living God was incorporated into their inmost 
nature by this sacramental meal which made them sons 
of God. It was these water-drinkers, who took the name 

1 Homer, Iliad, xi. 624,641; Ibid., Odyssey, x. 234, 316. 

2 Ibid., Cer., 20S; Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Preface, 
p. xlviii. 

3 Palmer, Qur'an, chap. ii. 129; S.B.E., vol. vi. p. 19, note 1 ; Sachau, 
Alberunl's Chronology of Ancient Nations, chap. viii. p. 193 ; burton, Arabian 
Nights., 'Story of Gharib and his brother Ajib,' vol. v. pp. 215, 216. 



524 History and Chronology 

of the Hanifa or the Righteous, who made Bhishma and 
Valarama, and the ruling races of India represented by these 
mythic sun and moon-gods, sons of the date-palm ; and it 
was the union between these reformers, who introduced 
among the upper class in India the belief in the duty of 
abstinence from strong drink, and the earlier and more 
savage invaders of the age of the eleven-months year, which 
was commemorated in the ritual of the Vajapeya and Raja- 
suya consecration sacrifices. In the latter of these the 
king, newly consecrated on a tiger-skin as the son of the 
tiger, runs a chariot race in a chariot drawn by four horses, 
and as he ascends the chariot claims to be an avatar of 
the Mahabharata god Arjuna 1 . 

F. The years of seventeen and thirteen months in the 
Mahabharata chronology. 

To obtain further insight into the history of this year we 
must turn to the Mahabharata. There we find its origin 
mythically attributed to the fifth year of the Pandavas' exile 
of thirteen years. It was at the end of the fourth year that 
they went Northward, as the gods of the year they began 
in the South, on their tour of pilgrimage of the sacred shrines 
described in the Tirtha-yatra sections of the Vana or Forest 
Canto. They reached the Northern point of their year's 
journey in the Himalayas on the seventeenth day of their 
departure from the South, and remained for seven days, the 
first week of this year, at the Gandha-madana, the grove 
of intoxicating odours, near the mount Mainaka, born of 
Meneka, the moon-goddess who measures {men) time 2 . It 
was there that they were joined by Arjuna, the god of the 
rainy season of the summer solstice, who then returned to 
earth from his five years' sojourn in Indra's heaven. 

The traditional history of this year is told in the story 
of Skanda, the sun-lizard, the god who was, as we have seen 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah. v. 4, 3, 1 ff. ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 98 ff. 

2 Mahabharata Vana (Yaksha-Ytidha)~?z.xva.,cWn., clxiv. pp.467, 468, 497. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 525 

in Chapter V. p. 279, born from the kettle of Kesari-tar. In 
the Mahabharata story he is the son of Svaha, the daughter 
of Prajapati disguised as one of the Pleiades and of Agni, 
in other words, the god born of the union of the matriarchal 
and patriarchal races, sons of the household fire, the sun-god 
born of the fire-flame. He was born in the land of Chaitra- 
ratha, that is, in the land ruled by the star Virgo (Chz'tra), 
which ruled the year of eleven months, and was called 
Kartikeya, the son of the Krittakas or Pleiades. He was 
a god of six faces, looking North, South East, and West, 
to the zenith and the nadir, who worshipped the sun-cock, 
that is to whom cocks, the offerings to the sun-physician, 
were sacrificed. This god, also called Guha, the concealed 
one, whose sixth face was that of the Pole Star goat, was 
attacked by Indra. From the blow of the thunderbolt of the 
god of the rainy season the second Skanda, the god Visakha, 
was born as the ruler of the month March — April, called 
after him, the first of the two months preceding the rainy 
season, and the mid-month of the Pleiades year. It was 
after the birth of Visakha on the fifth day of the bright half 
of Visakha that the son of Skanda and seven mothers, the 
seven stars of the Great Bear called Sisu, the child of the 
eight-rayed star, was born as the ninth god Kumara, whom 
I have described in p. 498 as the god of this year x . 

Skanda was married to Devasena, known by the eight 
names of Shashti, Lakshmi, Asa, Sukhaprada, Sinivali, 
Kuhu, Satvritti and Aparajata, that Is to the goddess of 
the eight-rayed star-mother of the child Sisu, the eighth 
ruling god of a year measured by the waxing moon Sinivali 
and the waning moon Kuhu, the year of new and full-moon 
sacrifices. After his marriage he went out to lead the seventh 
army corps of heaven in its search for a ruler of time to 
replace Abhijit, that is the star Vega, who had ceased to be 
the Pole Star, showing that the rule of Skanda was after 



1 Mahabharata Vana {Mdrkandeya-Samdsya) Parva, cexxxii. — cexxwii. pp. 
679—691. 



526 History and Chronology 

8000 B.C. and during the age when the Pole Star was in 
Hercules. It was then that, according to the Mahabharata 
story, the Krittakas or Pleiades were made the rulers of 
heaven succeeding Abhijit {Vega). Under their rule the 
thirteen wives of Kashypa, the thirteen months of this year, 
were made mothers of heaven ; and of them Vinata the 
tenth, Aditi, Diti, the mother of the Asuras and Kadru, the 
mother of the Nagas, are named, and they are said to be 
worshipped as Kadamba or almond-trees, the sacred tree 
of the Ooraons and Kharwars. It was after the installation 
of this new age that Skanda and Visakha (April — May) 
destroyed the Danava sons of the Pole Star god and their 
leader Mahisha, the buffalo, who was, as we have seen (p. 349); 
'once the god Indra ; and Skanda became after his victory the 
god with the fifty-one names recorded in the Mahabharata, 
that is the ruling god of this year of seventeen months and 
fifty-one weeks of seven days each *. 

This year of Skanda appears also in the history of the 
Pandavas in the account of the attempted rape of Drupadi 
by Jayadratha, which took place at the end of the eleventh 
year of the Pandava exile, and after Durvasa the ill-omened 
{duv) emissary of Duryodhana, Dusshasana, Kama and 
Shakuni, the gods of the four seasons of the eleven-months 
year, had fled from Krishna, who was on his arrival especially 
summoned by Drupadi to replenish, as the creator of time, 
her "sun-vessel," the beggar-bowl of the Buddha, "which 
till then always remained full after she had eaten." She 
besought Krishna to refill the exhausted bowl so as to 
enable her to give a meal to Durvasa and his attendants, 
which they would not stay to eat 2 . The revolution in time- 
reckoning, fore-shadowed in this refilling of the exhausted 
sun-bowl, was that caused by the arrival of Jayadratha, 
who arrived close to the Pandavas camp after the reinstal- 



1 Mahabharata Vana {Maskandcya-Samasya) Parva, ccxxviii., ccxxix., ccxxx., 
PP- 695—710. 

2 Mahabharata Vana {Ghoslia-yatru) Parva, cclvii., cclxi. pp. 763, 777 — 779. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 527 

lation of DrupadI by Krishna. He was king of the moon 
(sin) kingdom of Sin-dhu, who drove in his chariot horses 
of the Saindhava or moon-breed, which were in the story 
of Nila and DamayantI driven by Nila and Rituparna, the 
ruler of the seasons (ritu), when Nala learnt the art of time- 
calculation under the Arjuna (Terminalia belerica) tree. 
Jayadratha ruled the Sau-viras, the sons of the mother-bird 
Su, and as leader of this year of thirteen months he was 
followed by twelve Sau-vira princes named Angarika, 
Kunjara, Guptaka, Satrunjaya, Srinjaya, Suprabiddha 
{buddha}), Prabhankara, Bhramara, Ravi, Sura, Pratapa, 
Kuhana. He whose banner was the silver boar r , the moon- 
year-god, was the son of Vriddha-kshatra, the old {vriddhd) 
field (kshetrd), and the husband of Dus-shala, the hundred 
and first child and only daughter born from the egg laid 
by Gandharl, the Pole Star Vega, wife of Dhritarashtra 2 . 
She was the Hindu counterpart of Dinah, the female form 
of Dan, the Pole Star judge, and the thirteenth child and 
only daughter of Jacob. 

Jayadratha, the moon-god, the silver-boar, when he at- 
tempted to carry off DrupadI was seeking for a bride 
to replace Dus-shala, the goddess of the Kauravya year 
of eleven months ; and he passed the Pandava camp while 
the Pandava princes were out hunting, each of them as 
year-gods ruling the seasons of the year having gone, 
as we are told in the poem, to a different point on the 
horizon. Yudishthira, the god of spring, the sun rising in 
the East between the winter solstice and vernal equinox, 
was in the East ; Bhima, the god of summer, the sun com- 
ing from the South to reach the summer solstice in the 
North from his starting-point in the South, was in the 
South ; Arjuna, the god of the rainy season beginning at 
the summer solstice, was in the West ; and the twin-brethren 
Sahadeva and Nakula, the gods of autumn and winter, were 



1 Mahabharata Drona (Abhimanyu-badha) Parva, \liii. 3, p. 134. 
= Mahiibharata Acli {Sambhava) Parva, cxvii. p. 342. 



528 History and Chronology 

to the North, the point from which they started for their 
Southern home. 

When Jayadratha, who boasted his descent from the 
seventeen high clans, the seventeen months of his year, 
saw Drupadi leaning on a Kadamba-almond-tree as the 
tree-mother of the race born of the Kurum almond, the 
parent-tree of the Ooraons and the Jewish prophet-priests, 
the Kohathites, and of the thirteen year-mothers of the 
year of Skanda and the Kushika, he sent an emissary to try 
and persuade her to elope with him. When she refused 
he came himself with six followers, as the year-god of the 
year of seven-day weeks, to where she was standing. And 
when she declined to accompany him he carried her off 
forcibly and placed her in his chariot. 

This was the rape of the goddess of the Kurum-almond- 
tree whose sacred river was the Kurumnasa, which heralded 
the fall of the ancient faith in the goddess of the mother- 
tree and the introduction of the new worship of the rising 
white horse, the sun of the East, who succeeded the Pole 
Star as the ruler of heaven (p. 450). 

Jayadratha was followed by the Pandavas on their return, 
and they released Drupadi and forced Jayadratha to declare 
himself the- slave of the Pandavas and the god of their year 
of five seasons. When he escaped from his captors he 
implored Shiva, the three-eyed-god, for aid to revenge his 
defeat, but all Shiva would grant him was immunity from 
death at the hands of any of the Pandavas, except Arjuna, 
and one victory over his four brethren I . As for Arjuna, 
Shiva declared that he was the counterpart of Vishnu, the 
embodiment of the primitive water, the rain impregnated 
with the soul of life which came down from heaven to earth 
to people it with living forms. In this rhapsodical panegyric 
we have apparently a historical guide mark, showing that 
in. this year the fifth or rainy season was added to the four 



1 Mahabharata Vana (Draupadi-harana) Parva, cccxiii.— cclxxi. pp. 780 
-801. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 529 

seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter of the eleven- 
months year ; and we find in this further proof, in addition 
to those already given, of the intimate connection between 
this year and that of the year of eleven months. 

The promise of the short career of victory given to 
Jayadratha by Shiva was fulfilled in the eighteen-days 
battle between the Kauravyas and Pandavas. When 
Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna and Su-bhadra, was on the 
day of his death overthrowing all the foes he met, Jayad- 
ratha checked his career, and defeated in single combat 
Yudishthira and Bhima, as well as the five sons of Drupadi 
and the Panchala chief Dhrishthadyumna, the seen (drishtlid) 
bright one {dyumna). But he met his doom on the next 
day after Abhimanyu's death, the fourteenth day of the 
contest, when he was slain by Arjuna. Arjuna cut off his 
head with a magical shaft, which bore the head to the lap 
of Vriddha-kshatra, the Pole Star god, and thence it fell 
to earth, and as it fell the head of the Pole Star god broke 
into pieces, and his career as the world's ruler was ended z . 
In the story of the death of Jayadratha and Vriddha- 
kshatra, and the miraculous loss of the head of the former, 
we have a parallel to the disfigurement of Melanthios and 
Eurytion. Like them Jayadratha, the god with earrings 
ruling the year of the new and full-moon sacrifices, was 
when his career was ended changed from a god depicted 
in human form to be the sun-pillar god. 

We have already seen in the history of the thirteen-months 
year, as told in Santal ritual, that it came to India during 
the age of the rule of Kansa, the goose-god of the Ugro- 
Altaic Finns, and this conclusion is corroborated in the 
history of the thirteen Buddhist Theris. In this, as recorded 
in the Manoratha Puraul of Buddhaghosha, we are told that 
they were all born in Hanisa-vati, the city of the moon- 
goose Hamsa or Kamsa, when Paduinuttara, the Northern 

1 Mahabharata Drona {Ab/iimanyu-bad/ia) Taiva, xliii. pp. 133, 134, [faycfd- 
ratha-badlia) Parva, cxlvi. pp. 456, 457. 

M m 



53 o History and Chronology 

(uttara) lotus (paduma), was Buddha 1 . He was the thir- 
teenth Buddha, that is to say, the god of the lunar-year 
of thirteen months, whose capital was Hamsa-vati, the son 
of Ananda, the moon-bull-god Nanda, and of Su-jata, the 
goddess who consecrated the new-born Buddha under the 
Nigrodha-tree (Fiats Indica), the parent-tree of the Kushikas 
and of Kashyapa, whose wives were the thirteen months 
of this year. Su-jata gave this sun-god of the Banyan fig- 
tree the bowl of rice cooked with the milk of the eight 
cow-stars of the year of the eight-days week. The sacred 
tree of this Northern lotus-god was the Sal-tree (Shorea- 
robitsta), which gave birth, as we have seen in Chapter VII. 
p. 464, to the Buddha who entered his mother's womb 
as the elephant-headed rain-cloud, the god Gan-isha 2 . 

This year brought into Southern Asia by the Ugro-Altaic 
Finns became the year of the thirteen children of Jacob, 
of which the thirteenth was first Dinah, the female form 
of Dan, and the equivalent, as we have seen, of Dusshala, 
Jayadratha's first wife, as well as of Kadru, the tree (dru) 
mother of the Nagas, and the thirteenth wife of Kashyapa. 
In the patriarchal form of the year history Dinah, wife of 
the king of Shechem, the capital of Ephraim, became Ephraim 
or the two ashes (ep/ira), the second son of Joseph, who is 
represented in the tribal lists by his eldest son Manasseh. 



G. The seventeen and thirteen-months year in Egypt. 

This year appears in Egyptian mythology in Chapters 
CXLIV.— CXLVII. of the Book of the Dead, describing 
the journey after death of the souls of Ani, called Ani- 
Osiris, and his wife Thuthu through the Arits and Pylons 

1 I lode, 'Women Leaders of the Buddhist Reformation.' J.R.A.S., 1893, 
p. 522 ff. This statement as to the birth of Maha Paja"pati GotamI is repeated 
in the life story of each successive Theri. Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric 
Times, vol. ii., Essay vii., pp. 69— S3. 

Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories: The Niddnakatha, The Distant 
Epoch, 231, p. 42. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 531 

of Sekhet Aanre to the house of Osiris Nu, the god of the 
monthly and half-monthly festivals of the new and full- 
moons. Sekhet is the goddess depicted with a lion's head 
and also as a scorpion with horns and a disk. She is sym- 
bolised in astronomy as the star Antares a Scorpio ruling 
the autumnal equinox, and the temples at Thebes dedicated 
to her as Mat, the mother, are oriented to y Draconis, when 
it was the nearest rising and setting star to the Pole Star x . 
It was the seven scorpions sacred to this lunar-goddess, 
called Tefne, Bene, Mastet, Mastetef, Petet, Thetet and Matet, 
which showed Isis the way to the Papyrus Marsh, near the 
crocodile city of Pisni sacred to Osiris. She was there to 
be delivered of the second Horus, the sun-god, the older 
Horus being, as we have seen, the son of Hat-hor, the earlier 
form of Isis as Nebt-hat, the mistress of the house (hat) 
dwelling in the Pole Star 2 . 

The souls of Ani and his wife pass through the seven 
Arits and Pylons, depicted in the Papyrus of Ani, illustrating 
the Book of the Dead, as stages in the series of historical 
pictures seen by the souls of the departed on their way 
to the Elysian fields. In these are portrayed the ritual and 
symbolic forms of the successive gods, measurers of time, who 
succeeded the original tree and ape-gods of the matriarchal 
age, and had been worshipped as rulers of time by the 
Egyptian worshippers of the household fire, the sacrifice 
to which forms the subject of the first Vignette of the series. 

The first and second Arits, the first two days of the week 
of this year, are guarded by Sekhet, and the remainder by 
other gods, and at the entrance to the first Ant, a hare, the 
moon-hare, a serpent, and crocodile are sitting, and at the 
second, a lion, a man, and a dog, who also guard the seventh 
Arit. In the Vignette of the Pylons instead of twenty-one 
there are fourteen shrines, though in the text twenty-one 
Pylons are described, thus apparently proving that the 



1 Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, chap, xxi.x. pp. 2S9, 290. 

" Brugsch, Religion und Mythologic der Allen Aigypter, pp. 402 — 404. 

M m 2 



5^2 History and Chronology 

pictured story dates from the earlier age of the thirteen- 
months year, while the verbal text was composed during 
the time when the year of seventeen months had been made 
the national ritualistic year; and it seems to be all but 
absolutely certain that the seven Arits and fourteen and 
twenty-one Pylons represent the weeks, half-months, and 
months of this year x . 

The year of the sun-god of this and of the year of eight- 
day-weeks is apparently that called in Egyptian mythology 
the year of the Khepera, the beetle whose oval body (Q) 
represents the union of two crescent moons, that is to say, 
it depicts a year in which, as in the thirteen-months year, the 
months began with the new moon. The birth of the sun- 
god of this year called Ra, the Kheper, is described in the 
account given by Brugsch of the picture and inscription at 
Erment telling of his birth ; this represents it as taking 
place in Pharmuthi (January — February). His mother is 
in the pains of labour supported by the midwife Renpit, 
the year, and Nit or Neith, the vulture-weaving (neith) 
goddess, the constellation Vega, and also the female form 
of Kheper, the beetle. The child when born is given to 
a waiting-woman Menat, meaning the breast, that is to 
a wet nurse, who gives it to Khnumet, the female form of 
the architect-god Khnum ; and Amen-Ra, god of the South, 
and Rechebt, the Northern goddess, were witnesses of the 
birth. The seven Hat-hors from Upper and seven from 
Lower Egypt fly round as birds to protect the place of 
birth. They were the seven Khus, the masters of knowledge, 
raised from the primaeval water by the eight gods of 
creation to be the directors of the Meh-urt cow, the 
cow-goddess (urt) of the Flood {meh\ that of the era of 
the year of the Ten Kings of Babylon of Chapter VII., 
the last of whom, Xisuthros, was saved from the flood. 
The Meh-urt cow was also the goddess Nit. The Khus 
rose on earth out of the pupil of the eye of the rising sun, 



11 u 



Jge, Book oj (he Dead, Translation, chaps, cxliv.— cxlviii. pp. 240—261, 



of the Myth- Making Age. 533 

and ruled the world with the god Thoth or Dhu-ti, the 
moon-bird. They were the seven sparrow-hawks, the sun- 
birds, and the seven days of the week of this year of the 
beetle x . 

The story of the birth of this sun-beetle is also told in 
Chapter XVII. of the Book of the Dead, where he is said 
to be Ra, who gave birth to himself, and rose in the city 
of Sutenhenen, that is of the king (suten) of advancing time 
(henen), as the god Tern, the sun-god of day, moving from 
East to West. He came forth from the pool of Maat, that 
is in the age when Vega {Maat) was the Pole Star in the 
boat in which Tern goes to Sekhet Aaru, the realm of the 
goddess Sekhet of the seven scorpions. He passed through 
the gates of Shu, the fire-god, called Tchesert, meaning the 
gates of holy things, the ,two door-posts of heaven, the stars 
Gemini, and was borne in the arms of the gods Hu and Su, 
who attend upon Ra. They are described as the two drops 
of blood falling from the phallus of Ra when he mutilated 
himself, that is became the sexless sun-pillar-god. Their 
names are the dialectic forms of the primaeval cloud-bird 
Khu, the two birds of Night and Day, who in Rg. I. 164, 20, 
sit on the top of the world's tree. The day of his birth is 
that when Horus fought with Set, and when Thoth (Dhuti) 
emasculated Set and brought forth and healed the right eye 
of Ra. This god of the rising sun was born from the 
Meh - urt cow, the vulture - goddess Nit, represented in 
Vignette VIII. of the Papyrus of Ani, with disk and horns. 
His eye (tctchat) was filled by Osiris Ani, after it had been 
blinded by the filth cast by Set at Horus. The gods of 
the train of Horus, who were summoned by Ra, are the four 
sons of Horus, the four stars of the constellation Pegasus, 
whom he addressed as followers of the goddess Hetep- 
sekhus, that is of the sun at rest (hetep), the setting sun 
which began the solstitial year of the Pole Star age, and 
they became four of the seven Khus who attended on 

* Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien Mgypter, pp. 164, 116, 521. 



534 History and Chronology 

Ra when he declared himself to be the divine soul dwel- 
ling between the two Tchafi, the Northern and Southern 
sun, and also the divine cat who fought by the Persea- 
tree when the foes of Neb-er-tcher, the lord of the boun- 
daries (tcher), were destroyed. He is finally declared to 
be the god who goes round heaven robed in the flame of 
his mouth, who commands Hapi, the ape-god of the Nile. 
He is Nemu, the reporter of Osiris, Horus, Thoth (Dhn-ti) 
and Anubis rolled into one, and he as Kheper is watched 
over by the mothers Isis and Nebt-hat, who are called in line 
125 of this chapter the ape-goddesses I . 

Thus this conquering sun-god of the year of the beetle, 
born in January — February, when he came from the pool 
of the Pole Star Vega through the gates (tchesert) of the 
Twins, the stars Gemini, is the rising sun, son of the sun-god 
of the eight-rayed star, the eight creating-gods, who was 
born when the sun was in Gemini in January — February and 
when Vega was the Pole Star, that is about 10,200 B.C., 
as the first of the series of sun-gods whose evolution has 
been traced in this Chapter and Chapter VII. He was 
the god of the year of the moon-cat, who ruled the second 
day of the week of Jack the Giant-killer, and his year was 
controlled by Thoth (DJin-ti), the moon-god. 

The sun-god of this year of thirteen months also appears 
in Vignette III. of the Papyrus of Ani as Anubis, the Jackal 
of the constellation of the Little Bear, who tests the tongue 
of the Balance in which the soul of Ani is to be weighed and 
judged by the testing-god and his twelve colleagues, who are 
depicted as setting behind the weighing scales. Their judge- 
ment is to be delivered after receiving the report of the 
weighing given by Thoth (Dhu-ti), who stands ready to 
prepare it with the scroll in his left and the pen feather in 
his right hand. 

The representation of the central god of this year as 
Anubis, the jackal, shows that this thirteen-months year 
belongs to the second stage of the Horus myth. In the first 

1 Budge, Book of the Dead, chap. xvii. pp. 47—58. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 535 

he is the bird-headed sun-god, born- of Hat-hor, and his 
assumption of the head of the jackal marks the age of 
the lunar cult, of which this thirteen-months year is the 
most unequivocal expression. The transition from the bird- 
headed to the jackal-headed Horus is shown in the figure 
found in Egyptian temples depicting him with the heads 
of the bird and the Jackal r . 

The connection of the jackal-god with this year is also 
preserved in the Buddhist cosmogony of the thirteen Theris, 
in which he is the son of the thirteenth Theri Sigala-Mata, 
the mother of the jackal. The Egyptian biography of Ra 
also shows that his year of thirteen months was made the 
official year long before its priestly developement of the 
year of seventeen months of twenty-one days each was 
introduced. 

This year of thirteen months, in which the year-god was 
delivered by the midwife-goddess Nit or Neith, furnishes 
in its birth-story further evidence of the connection I have 
already noted between it and the year of eleven months. 
Neith, the weaver, is the Egyptian Athene, the goddess of 
the weaving races of Lybyans who wove the flax whence the 
sacred garments both of the Egyptian and Jewish priests were 
made. I have already, in Chapter VI. p. 308, shown that the 
Indian Telis or oil-sellers, who worshipped the eleven gods of 
the year are the sons of the Sesame flax-plant, which also yields 
oil, and that they brought it to India from Asia Minor. It 
must have been from the same quarter, and probably by way 
of India, that both the years of eleven and thirteen months 
were brought to Egypt by the Kushite merchant kings. 

H. The thirteen-months year of the Nooktas of British 
Columbia. 

This year is that used by the Nooktas of British Columbia, 
who show, both in their physique and their mode of life, 
strong affinities with the Polynesians and the seafaring 

* Lockyer, Datum of Astronomy^ p. 149. 



336 History and Chronology 

Dravidians of India. That have flat noses, thick lips and 
broad Dravidian features, and both long and short heads are 
found among them. They clothe themselves in bark dresses 
and wear a cap in the shape of a truncated cone, somewhat 
like the Hittite cap. They wear their hair either hanging 
loose or divided into tufts, and the only Columbian Indians 
who cut their hair are the Haidas. They tatoo themselves 
like the Ooraons and Burmese, and pluck out the beard. 
They live in large houses capable of holding all the living 
generations of a family, and build their houses on piles, both 
of which are Polynesian customs, and, like the Dravidian 
Males, they place totem poles in front of their houses. They 
use the bow and are also great fishermen, and build large 
flat canoes without the outrigger of the Polynesians and 
Malays, and which are, from their description, very like 
the large flat boats of Madras. They make fire by twirling 
a stick of cedar in a socket of softer wood, and cover 
the outside of their houses with painted designs, like those I 
have often seen on the houses of Santals in Bengal, and 
the Santals are the only forest tribes on whose houses I have 
seen these designs *. In short, the people are very like 
maritime Santals and the Turano Dravidian coast races. 
They trace their descent in a curious way. The family 
descends through the wife, who brings her father's position 
and privileges to her husband, but he avails himself of them 
only as her deputy, the real possessor being her son, but she 
on her marriage goes and lives in her husband's village, and 
certain privileges descend in the paternal line. The family 
crest, representing the totem ancestor and conferring the 
privileges of noble, free or slave origin, descends through 
the mother. The members of each village community are, 
as among the Khands in Orissa, thought to be descended 
from a common ancestor. The strange mixture of patri- 
archal and matriarchal customs making up their very intricate 
system of tribal law clearly marks them as a mixed race 

1 Ratsel, History of Mankind, Translated by A. J. Butler, A r ol. ii. pp. 
19, 91 — 100. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 537 

descended, like the Indian Dravidians, from matriarchal and 
patriarchal ancestors r . 



I. The May perambulations of boundaries dating from 
this year. 

Before I conclude the history of this year I must show 
by its connection with ancient perambulations of boundaries 
in May how widely its use was extended over Europe. We 
have seen in the history of the births of the Buddha that 
in his progress through the Mahosadha birth as the sun- 
physician, the Vessantara birth in the Tusita heaven of 
wealth, and his final birth as the deified sun-god who had 
left earth for heaven, he was born first at the beginning 
of Magh (January — February), that his Vessantara birth 
took place about the end of Phagun (February — March) 
at the vernal equinox, and that it was fifty days after this 
that he became the sun-god, the supreme ruler of heaven, 
who circled the sky on the path he had marked out for 
himself among the zodiacal stars, and had ceased to yield 
obedience to the Pole Star god or to the crescent and full- 
moon-gods of the lunar era, as the Pole Star god's head was 
broken when that of Jayadratha with its lunar -earrings was 
cut off. 

We have also seen that the son of Skanda, the new sun- 
god of this year succeeding that of Jayadratha, was born on 
the 5th of Visakha (April — May), a date nearly answering 
to St. George's Day, and this month is prominently repre- 
sented in the lives of the Buddhist Theris, for both the third 
Theri Padumavati and the ninth Bhudda Kundalakesha, the 
curly-headed saint, also called Su-bhadda or Su-bhadra, the 

1 Boas, The Social Organisation and the Secret Societies of the Kwatiutl 
Indians, pp. 334—338. The Noolka arc a branch of the Kwatiutl Indians, 
p. 632. They used to sacrifice human beings., the sacrifice taking place during 
the great annual festival lasting from the middle of November to the middle 
of January, showing that like the Santals they kept the festival of the winter 
solstice, p. 636. 



538 History and Chronology 

mountain -goddess, were in the course of their transforma- 
tions daughters of Visakha, and the fifth Dhammadinna was 
once his wife ; that is to say, they all three belonged to 
years beginning in Visakha (April — May) I . 

The sun-horse Parikshit was offered at the full-moon of 
Cheit (March — April), when his successor began his rule, 
so that the beginning of the year of this changing sun-god 
varied like our Easter from the vernal equinox to the 23rd 
of April. And with this variation in the starting date there 
was a similar variation in the date of the birth of the as- 
cended and immortal sun-god, which fell fifty days after that 
of his mortal predecessors, the sun-horse and its rider. 
Judging by the persistent endeavours of the ancient ritualists 
to introduce history into their rites by the very recondite 
methods I have noted in previous chapters, it seems probable 
that these fifty days were connected with this year of fifty- 
one weeks or of some lunar mode of reckoning by months 
of fifty Tithi or lunar days, measured by a different scale 
of hours from that which we use, such as I have suggested 
in Chapter VII. p. 457, and in this latter case the fifty days 
would represent one month of the year, which was to be 
completed by those intervening between his ascent into 
heaven and the end of his year. But whatever the explan- 
ation solving the difficulty may be, there can apparently be 
no doubt that the assumption of an interval of fifty days 
between the Easter birth of the sun-god and his ascent into 
heaven originated in this epoch, and arose out of the history 
of this^year of seventeen and thirteen months; and that 
it was then that the birth of the sun-child Sisu, son of 
Devasena, the moon-bird-goddess of the eight names, was 
celebrated by the Easter-eggs and the adoration of the 
moon-hare, which still survive in the symbolic Easter con- 
fectionery of Germany. 

The history of these successive rebirths of the sun-god, 
beginning at Christmas and ending at Pentecost, is, as we 

1 Hewitt, Killing Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay vii., pp. 74 — 77, 80. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 539 

have seen, depicted in the life of the Buddha, and the 
universal diffusion of this dramatic panorama of the scenes 
of the moving scroll of time is proved by the reproduction 
of the Eastern pictorial series in the life of the Western 
king Arthur. The story of Arthur or Airem, the plough- 
man, son of Uther, that is Uther Bran of the wonderful 
head, the gnomon-stone r , who was originally the ploughing- 
sun-god, a Western form of the Eastern Rama, has been 
brought in its modern forms into accordance with Christian 
theology ; but it was originally a history of pre-Christian 
faiths culminating in the worship of the white horse or mare 
of the sun. Her temple, that of the British goddess Epona, 
is close to Amesbury, whither Guinivere, his queen, who was 
originally Gwen-hwyvar, the white {gwen) spirit {Jiwyvar), 
one of the three-year wives of the ploughing-god with the 
same name 2 , betook herself, after Arthur had met his death 
at the hands of his son Modred, the archer and the winter- 
king 3. It is in the story of the coronation of Arthur that 
we find the record of his successive rebirths from the time 
when he as the sun-god entered Gemini in December — 
January, about 12,000 B.C., to his Easter birth in Gemini 
at the vernal^ equinox, about 6000 B.C., and his final con- 
secration at the end of fifty days at Whitsuntide. His birth 
as the sun-god was manifested by his drawing from the 
sun-gnomon-stone the sun-sword, a feat, like that of the 
stringing of the year-bow of Arjuna and Odusseus, only 
to be accomplished by the ruling year-god. Arthur proved 
that he alone could take the sun-sword from the stone in five 
repeated trials, which were wholly unnecessary to prove his 
power, for which one trial was enough. These were at Christ- 
mas, Twelfth Night, Candlemas, Easter and Whitsuntide, 
at which last festival he was finally crowned king 4. Thus 

1 Rhys, Hibbert Lectures, p. 97. 

2 Ibid., The Arthurian Legend, chap, ii., pp. 25, 35, 36. 

3 Ibid., chap. ii. pp. 38, 39; Malory, Morte d' Arthur, Globe Edition, 
Book i. chaps, xvii., xviii., xxv. pp. 42 — 44, 48, 49, Book xxi. chap. vii. 

4 Malory, Morte a" Arthur, Book i. chaps, hi., iv., v., pp. 28, 31. 



540 History and Chronology 

this story, when repeated in its pre-Christian form, tells 
us that in the progress of ages he showed his right to rule 
first, as the sun-god awoke, like the Phoenician Archal, from 
his twelve-days sleep at Christmas ; secondly, as the sun- 
child born on Twelfth Night ; thirdly, as the ploughing- 
sun-god of the year beginning in January — February; 
fourthly, as the god of the Easter year of the vernal equinox; 
and fifthly, as the ruler of the universe born and crowned 
in heaven at Whitsuntide. 

In the interval between the Easter birth and the ascen- 
sion and rebirth at Pentecost there are held, almost every- 
where throughout Europe, New Year's festivals, in which the 
boundaries of each village and parish are circumambulated. 
It is in the Roman ritual that we find most satisfactory 
evidence of the ritualistic teaching conveyed in these cere- 
monies. There are two of these festivals in May, one on the 
15th and the other on the 29th, in which processions went 
round the city boundaries as the representative sun-god 
of this year went round in his chariot the race-course, sym- 
bolising his zodiacal circuit. 

The festival of the 1 5th of May is called that of the Argei, 
and is dedicated in the Fasti to Jupiter and to Mercurius 
of the Circus Maximus, the god of boundaries. The pro- 
cession on this day ended at the Pons Sublicius, the ancient 
bridge over the Tiber, in the construction of which no iron 
was used. It was led by all the Pontifices or priests, by the 
Flaminica Dialis or female priestess of Jupiter in mourning, 
and by the Vestal Virgins carrying twenty-four Argei or 
puppets, made of rushes to resemble men bound hand and 
foot, and they threw these into the Tiber from the bridge. 
The name Argei given to these rush dolls shows that they 
were connected with the twenty-four shrines, the Sacella 
Argcorum, which marked the boundaries of the Servian city 
of Rome, and round which the Salii carried the year-shields 
in the March festivals beginning the year, which I have 
described in Chapter V. p. 239. No one who has read the 
account, which I will give presently, of the ancient procession 



of the Myth- Making Age. 541 

of the 15th May, held at Iguvium, the modern Gubbio, the 
capital of Umbria, will be it seems to me able to doubt that 
the procession of the twenty-four Argei went round the 
boundary shrines of the city before reaching the bridge, and 
that each of the shrines contributed a slain victim for the 
final sacrifice to the river-parent-god. Thus the whole 
ceremony denoted a national mourning for the death of the 
old year of fifteen months of twenty-four days each, or of 
the twenty-four lunar phases of the year of twelve months, 
a mourning marked by the dress of the Flaminica Dialis 
representing the mother of the dead sun-god. 

That this sacrifice of the puppets, the dead remains of the 
old year, was a survival from a more ancient human sacrifice 
offered throughout Europe and Asia at the end of the year 
is indubitably proved by the evidence of national rituals. 
In the festival of Thargelion (May — June) at Athens to 
Artemis and Apollo, corresponding to the Roman festival 
of the 15 th of May, a man and a woman crowned with 
flowers and fruit, like sacrificial victims, were thrown from 
a rock with curses and led over the frontier r . Similarly, 
in Bavaria at Whitsuntide a boy in some places, a puppet 
in others, is decorated and carried round the fields, and 
thrown from a bridge into the river ; and there is a similar 
Whitsuntide sacrifice at Halle of a straw doll called Der Alte 
or the old man, which is strictly analogous to the Roman 
festival, in which the victims were traditionally old men, 
as is shown by the saying " Sexagenarios de ponte " — The 
old men from the bridge. The observance of this custom, 
almost universal throughout Germany, was forbidden at 
Erfurt by a law of 1 5 5 1 prohibiting the ducking of people 
at Easter and Whitsuntide 2 . This sacrifice was also simu- 
lated in the Indian ritual of the making of the fire-pan, in 
which a sham man was carried about with the gold plate 
and twenty-one knobs ; and in the consecration sen i< e 

1 Miiller, Die Doritr, Book ii. chap. viii. § 2, p. .' 

1 Mannhardt, Baumkultus, pp. 331, 359, 420 ; VV. Warde Fowler, The 
Roman Festivals, Mcnsis Maius, III — 121, 



542 History and Chronology 

beginning the building at the new year of the brick Aha- 
vanlya altar of the year-bird rising in the East at the vernal 
equinox a human sacrifice was actually offered, and the head 
of the victim buried, as I shall show in Chapter IX., at the 
East end of the altar. 

The second sacrifice in May, accompanied by a circuit 
of boundaries, is the Ambarvalia or solemn perambulation 
of the fields. Its date, as given in the calendars, is the 29th 
of May. Three animals, a bull, a sheep and a pig, were 
driven three times round the limits of each estate and muni- 
cipality by a crowd crowned with garlands and carrying 
olive branches in their hands, and the animals were sacri- 
ficed when 'the third round was completed *. An exactly 
similar sacrifice was held every year at Athens on the 6th 
of Thargelion (May — June), when the same animals were 
sacrificed 2 . 

J. The perambulations of boundaries in Gubbio and Echiernach. 

We have fortunately in the Eugubine Tables fuller infor- 
mation about this sacrifice and its early ritual than is extant 
for any other religious rite of ancient worship in any country, 
except those described in the Indian Brahmanas. In these 
we find a minute description of the annual circumambulation 
of Gubbio, the Umbrian capital Iguvium, and we can, as 
I shall show presently, supplement and illustrate these old 
official instructions by the observances of the modern suc- 
cessor of the ancient rite which takes place every year at 
Gubbio on the 15th of May, the same date as that of the 
procession round the Servian walls of Rome. 

The tables give the rules for two different official circuits 
of the boundaries of Iguvium, dominated by the sacred hill 
Ingino, a name which irresistibly connects the city, its 
worship of the household fire, and the mother-mountain, 

1 W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, Mensis Maius, pp. 124 — 128. 
- Diogenes Laertius Socrates, c. 23 ; Fustel de Coulanges, La Cite Antique, 
pp. 186, 187. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 543 

with the ancient German Ing, Inguina, the Ingsevones of 
Tacitus, who describes them as the eldest sons of Mannus, 
son of Tuisco, dwelling nearest the ocean *. They are the 
men of the household-hearth and the ingle-nook, and it was 
to these ancient parent-gods that the Umbrian city and 
confederacy were dedicated. 

In both the circuits described 2 , the priests had before the 
ceremony to take the auspices from the birds, and if they 
were favourable, the priest called the Adfertor or arranger 
(answering to the Hindhu Adhvaryu, the advancer on the 
road (adhvan) ), and his two assistants, had to be invested 
with the praetexta or official robe with purple stripes, aud- 
io place the sacrificial cord on his right shoidder, according to 
the pre-solar custom of the Hindu Pitaro-Barishadah of the 
Pole Star Age. He was then to pray to the sacred owl 
(parra), and again to take the auspices at the augur's chair 
in the sacred augural templum or enclosure, which was with 
the temple of Vista in the centre of the city, whence the four 
roads leading to the four points of the compass branched 
off. He must then make the circuit of the city, driving 
before him the victims for the sacrifice, the pigs, sheep and 
bulls, and must on reaching the boundary expel any aliens 
who have settled in the city without becoming naturalised 
Umbrians. At the end of each of the three circuits silent 
prayers must be said to Cerfus Martius, Pnestita Cerfia and 
Tursa Cerfia of Cerfus Martius. 

In this ritual it is perfectly clear that we have a very 
close approximation to that observed in the old pre-Vedic 
sacrifices in India. The rules as to the wearing of the 
sacrificial cord and the bearing of the fire on the right 
shoulder, as well as the injunction to pray silently, are 
identical with those of the worship of Prajsipati; also the 
three circuits of the walls must like the three Hindu circuits 

1 Tacitus, Germania, 2. 

2 Bower, The Ceri at Gubbio. Published by the Folklore Society, 1S97. 
Appendix, Lustration of the Iguvine People, Eugubine Tables vi. and vii. 
pp. 132—140. 



544 History and Chronology 

round the altar in the Pole Star age, have been left-handed 
against the course of the sun, the direction in which as 
will be seen presently the priests make their circuit in the 
modern procession. Furthermore the triad to whom prayers 
are addressed is a reproduction of the gods of the Gond 
trident of Pharsi-pen and of the three tree-gods of the 
Tri-kadru-ka sacrifice. Both Breal and Bucheler, the editors 
and interpreters of the Eugubine Tables, agree in thinking 
that Cerrus is the Latin equivalent of the Umbrian Cerfus, 
and they derive it from the root Cer or Ker, to create, which 
is also the root of the name Ceri, given to the three pedestals 
carried in the modern procession at Gubbio. Cerrus is used 
by Pliny, Hist. Nat. xvi. 6, as the name of a species of 
oak, the Quercus Cerrus of Linnaeus, which grows in the 
Apennines and Piedmont. Hence these three Cerfi would 
be the three oaks, the Drei-eich or three oak mothers of 
Germany, of Grimm, and the Tri-kadru-ka of India. The 
three stems of the three parent mother-trees, the goddess 
Mari-amma or the tree-mother of India, the Sanskrit Drona 
or hollowed tree-stem holding the sacred Soma, and the 
Greek mother-goddesses Leto and Artemis Orthia, wor- 
shipped as tree-trunks. The Asherah or tree-pillars of the 
Jews, which became among the Northern races who wor- 
shipped the Hir-mensul or great gnomon-stone of the sun, 
the Perrons of Germany, the village sun-stones, surmounted 
as in the Perron of Augsberg, with the pine cone as the 
sign of the tree-mother. It was this stem of the parent- 
tree which was the Thyrsus of Bacchus, with the pine cone 
on the top. The names of the gods of this triad also give 
further proof of their close connection with the Gond and 
Takka triads, for they are identical with the gods of the 
Gond triad of Pharsipot, in the fact that they represent 
the central father-god, the middle prong of the trident and his 
two wives, who in the Gond trident are the two tiger,-mothers 
Manko and Janko Rayetal (p. 160). These last are here 
called Prsestita, or the protecting, and Tursa, or the towered 
Cerfia, the latter being the goddess wearing the tower of 



of the Myth-Making Age. 545 

Cybele and Isis, and she is, as we shall see presently, the 
goddess with a temple consecrated to herself, to whom 
heifers are offered, and not the boars and sows sacrificed 
to Cerfus Martius and Praestita Cerfia. That these three gods 
were represented like the Indian Jugahnath by consecrated 
logs or tree-stems is also proved by the modern Ceri. These 
are made of stout wooden poles, of which the outward shape, 
when they are carried in procession, is that of hour-glasses, 
as their upper and lower halves form a cage-shaped protu- 
berance, so that each Cero is shaped similarly to the Hindu 
altar in the form of a woman, broad at the ends and 
contracted at the waist r . The modern Ceri are doubtless 
imitations of those of the three mother- tree-goddesses carried 
in the old lustral procession, preserved by the conservative 
instinct which is so strong a characteristic of the Umbrian 
and Tuscan people. 

The Eugubine Table VII. gives the ritual of a procession 
round the boundary shrines of Gubbio, which is clearly 
part of the series of services of which the procession 
of Table VI. is the opening service. It tells us where and 
how the sacrifices offered during the circuits were to be 
made. Three of these were offered apparently at the three 
gates which formed the entrances to Iguvium as to other 
Etrurian towns 2 . The first sacrifice was at Fontuli, where 
three boars, red or black, were offered to Cerfus Martius 
with silent prayers and wavings of incense censors, as in 
the Indian worship of the age of the Pandavas, whose priest 
was Dhaumya or the son of the incense smoke {dJiumo). 
Corn, sour wine and spelt meal, the parched meal of 
the Pitaro Barishadah, were also offered. At Rubinia three 
sows, red or black, were offered to Praestita Cerfia with 
drink offerings of sour wine, corn, and cakes. This was 
followed by libations and silent prayers over the black 
vessels consecrated to Praestita Cerfia, which were succeeded 



1 See Plate V. ; Bower, The Ceri at Gubbio, p. 50. 

2 Bower, The Procession of the Ceri at Gubbio, p. Ill, note I. 

N n 



546 History and Chronology 

by those over the white vessels dedicated to her, and the 
four vessels, two white and two black, were placed, as the 
ritual expressly says, crosswise, that is in the form of the 
St. Andrew's Cross, representing the solstitial sun, so that 
Prsestita Cerfia was the sun-hen, the Indian goddess Ahalya, 
or Vrisha-kapi, the rain-ape with the lunar earrings given 
to Utanka (p. 313). She was wife of Gautuma or Indra, in 
the days when he was the rain-ape-god Maroti, the god of 
the tree {inarovi), and the West wind Martu, whence he 
came to Italy as Martius. 

After the libations to the goddess of the solstitial sea- 
sonal vessels a cake and spelt meal were offered to Fisovius 
Sancius, the Iguvine form of the sowing-god Semo Sancus, the 
god born of the sacred grass, who slew Cacus (p. 442). He was 
the god of the Fisian hill, now called Ingino, the god of the 
cleft (fissus), perhaps the male form of the Syrian Tirhatha, 
the cleft, and of the river issuing from the cleft to form 
the town brook. He clearly is a god belonging to the ritual 
of the Southern mothers, to whom only first-fruits and no 
living victims were offered. The third sacrifice was offered 
after the third circuit beyond Sata, and after the Adfertur 
and his two assistants, wearing the lustral prsetexta, had 
prayed in silence in the temple of Cerfia Tursa, called Tursa 
Jovia, whence it appears that this goddess was worshipped 
in a shrine consecrated to her instead of in the open air, 
like the two other gods. She was tjie goddess of the later 
age following that when men worshipped on the mountain 
tops or on artificial hills. It was from her temple that the 
three heifer-calves to be sacrificed to her were driven to 
the decurional or centre forum. After they were caught in 
a sham hunt they were taken to Aquilonia, and there sacri- 
ficed to Tursa Jovia with drink-offerings, corn and a cake. 
At each of the sacrifices pieces were to be given, these 
were doubtless, as in Indian ritual, the pieces of the victims 
given to the townspeople to bury in their fields to secure 
good crops. We see in this ritual that it is female animals 
that are sacrificed to female goddesses, and the heifers offered 



of the Myth- Making Age. 547 

to Tursa are like the Jewish heifer-offerings and the sacrifice 
of a cow on the Indian Ashtaka, and belong apparently to 
an older ritual than those in which the oxen of the age of 
the sexless gods and bulls were offered. 

The whole of the ritual of Iguvium was under the con- 
trol of the twelve Attidian brethren, who, whether they 
were priests of the Phrygian god Attis or not, were clearly 
a branch of the same order of dancing priests originating 
in Asia Minor, to which the Roman Salii, the priests of 
Mars, belonged, and who succeeded, in South-western Asia, 
the female dancers of the Indian matriarchal villages, the 
offspring of the mother-tree and the tree-ape-god Maroti, 
the prototype of the Umbrian Martius, who became the 
Etruscan Maso, the god of increase. 

There is no mention in the ritual of the Iguvine circuit pro- 
cessions of the sacrifice of a sheep, which was apparently an 
addition to the earlier ritual in which pigs first and after- 
wards heifers were offered. But the ritual of a sheep sacrifice 
is given in the Eugubine Tables, and it apparently be- 
longed to the series of those offered at the birth and 
ascension to heaven of the Easter sun-god. The object of 
the ritual of this sheep sacrifice is the sanctification of the 
temple spring, the fountain welling forth from the prints 
of the hoof of the sun-horse. For this a special priest was 
appointed from the Collegia of the Attidian brethren. He 
chooses a sheep for the sacrifice, which is brought in from the 
country with the sacred fire. The sheep is carried on a litter 
divided into two, an upper and lower compartment, like those 
of the Ceri. The sacrifice is offered after the priest enters 
the temple, apparently that of Tursa, to various deities, 
among whom are Jupiter, Pumunus Publicus and Tursa, 
and wine and corn are offered with it. But the fact that it 
is a sacrifice in which the priest turns to the right, shows that 
it was an offering of the solar age, belonging to the creed 
of the worshippers of the male Su-astika, the sun who 
begins his annual journey by going South at the summer 
solstice. The sheep sacrificed is the Easter lamb eaten by 

N n 2 



548 History and Chronology 

the Jews at the Passover, the lamb of the year beginning 
with the feast of Purim, that sacrificed by the Bulgarians 
to St. George on his day, and that eaten on Easter day in 
almost every house in Greece. It was the substitute for 
the animal sacrifice of the eldest son, the child eaten by 
the Sabaean Haranites, who pray turning not to the North, 
like the Mandaite Sabaeans, but to the South, and who were 
the followers of the White God Laban in the age of the 
eleven-months year. In the Mandaite New Year's sacri- 
fice at the autumnal equinox, a wether and not a lamb is 
slain T . 

We have now, in seeking further illustrations of the inner 
meaning and historical significance of the ceremonies be- 
ginning the Umbrian New Year of the Easter sun-god, to 
turn to the festival celebrated every year at Gubbio on the 
15th of May, of which Mr. Bower, in his account of the 
procession, has given us a picture in which the smallest 
details are artistically recorded. He begins with a descrip- 
tion of the three Ceri. The first of these is now dedicated 
to St. Ubaldo, but formerly it was that of St. Francisco, 
and originally the Cero of Ingino, the mountain-mother. 
The other two are called those of St. George and St. 
Anthony, a dedication marking the festival, in which 
they appear as principal actors, as one to the year-gods 
of the year of three seasons, originally that of Orion, 
but beginning, when it was dedicated to St. George, 
at the autumnal equinox. This was, as we have seen in 
Chapter V., the season sacred to St. George as the ploughing- 
god, who was originally born at the autumnal equinox as 
god of the upright four-armed cross with equal arms, called 
after him, but who became in the course of the evolution 
of religious belief I have described in this and the previous 

1 Bower, Procession of the Ceri, pp. 114, 115; Hewitt, Ruling Races of 
Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Preface, p. xvi., Essay vii., pp. 55, 56; Essay viii., 
p. 164; Chwolsohn, Ssabier und der Sabiismus, ii., Excursus to chap. ix. 
PP- 3 I 9> 364 5 Garnett and Stuart Glennie, Wotnen of Turkey, chap. xii. 
PP- 332, 333- 



of the Myth-Making Age. 549 

chapters, the god of the Easter sun. St. Anthony, who 
carries a fire-ball in his hand *, is, in Italian popular my- 
thology, the god of the household fire-place, and the especial 
protector of pigs 2 . In considering the history of these three 
survivals of ancient creeds, we must not forget that St. Ubaldo's 
body is believed to be imperishable, that he is reclothed 
every year before his festival, and that one of his titles to the 
supremacy among the three Cero saints is that he conquered 
eleven cities for the Iguvians 3. In these attributes he is 
clearly declared to be the never-dying sun-god of this epoch, 
who yearly reclothes himself in the green leaves and flowers 
of summer, and who, as the conqueror of the god Dadhiank 
of the horse's head ruling the eleven-months year, has become 
the supreme ruler of heaven and earth. These properties 
and victories of the conquering sun-god, set forth in the 
original ritualistic history, have been transferred to St. 
Ubaldo in the modern transformation of the old birth-story. 

The bearers who carry these Ceri in the procession wear 
a uniform, of which the most noticeable articles are the red 
cap with its long strings and tassel, and the white or red 
shirt. The red colour marks the wearers as members of the 
rqd race of Adam, the red earth, but the cap is the most 
significant part of the dress. It is the cap of the red-capped 
goblin, the Leprechaun of Ireland, who is believed to guard 
treasure, and who is the parent-god of the dwarf mining 
races ; and his red head is an inheritance from his bird- 
parents, the red-headed wood-pecker. This wood-pecker, the 
wood-king Picus, was beloved by the witch-goddess Circe, 
the hawk (kirke) ruler of time in the West, the land of the 
setting sun. He refused her advances, and was changed by 
her into a wood-pecker 4. He was the father of Faunus, the 
deer or antelope sun-god, and the grandfather of Latinus. 
He is, in short, the bird-parent of the forest miners, whose 

' Bower, Procession of I he Ceri, p. 114. 

- Lelaiul, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 23S — 240, 252. 

3 Bower, Procession of the Ceri, pp. ij, 17, 22, 30, 123. 

4 Virgil, sEncid, vii. itfy — 191. 



550 History and Chronology 

emigration I have traced from the Ural mountains through 
Europe and Asia, where their memory has been preserved 
in the traditional history of every country where they have 
settled. They were all sun-worshippers, and their red-capped 
goblin-parent, s.on of the red-headed wood-pecker, is believed 
to be a guardian of mineral wealth by the Algonquin 
Indians, as well as by the Italian, Irish, and German 
peasants 1 . It was the believers in this bird as the messenger 
and embodiment of the god of wealth, who made the female 
Su-astikas found in old Indian tombs in Mississipi and 
Tennessee, in which the beak and head of this wood-pecker 
form the arms of the Su-astika 2 . This was the bird-guardian 
of the treasure of the dwarfs, who is said by Pliny to have 
the power of opening any mountain or closed place by the 
virtue of a plant it gathers at the night season of the moon, 
and he calls it Picus Martius, or the bird sacred to the god 
Martius of Gubbio, the divine wood-pecker. He is said by 
Suidas to be worshipped in Crete as Pekos Zeus (tti^kos 
Zeus), and to foretell rain ; and is apparently identical with 
the sacred bird of St. Martin, the Saint of November, who 
ruled the original year of the Pleiades, the ice-bird of Aris- 
totle who sits on her eggs in winter 3. It was this bird, 
whose history shows it to have been looked on as a bird 
ruling time in the earliest year-reckonings, who led the Finn 
miners to India, where they disseminated their belief in the 
Southern god of the winter solstice as the god of wealth, and 
as the god who brings from the South the rich gifts of spring 
at the vernal equinox. It was under the banner of this god 
that the Pandavas came back to the sacrifice of the sun- 
horse with the wealth they had taken from the Southern 
mines; and it was from the Tusita heaven of this god of 



r Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains, pp. 162—165. 

2 See Figures 263, 264, 269, Wilson on the Suastika, pp. 906, 907. Reports 
of the Smithsonian Institution, United States National Museum, 1896. 

3 De Gubernatis, Die Thiere (German Translation), chap. vii. pp. 543, 546 ; 
Pliny, 10, 18, 20 ; Aristotle, De Gen. Animalium, v. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 551 

wealth (tuso) that the Buddha was born in his Vessantara 
birth at the vernal equinox. 

These red - capped Ceraioli wearing the livery of this 
treasure-guardian are divided into three bodies. The first, 
who bear the Cero of St. Ubaldo, belong to the Society of 
the Muratori or Masons, Their leader is the First Captain 
or chief director of the festival, who entertains the principal 
guests present at the feast celebrating the day. He is 
elected by lot on St. Ubaldo's day, the 16th of May, from 
among the Society of Masons, but he must be of noble birth. 
He holds office for twelve months, and in the days when 
Gubbio was the capital of a republic he was the national 
President *. The Ceraioli of St. George belong to the Guild 
of Traders, and those of St. Anthony are Contadini or 
countrymen ; so that the three saints are the patron-gods 
of the Nobles, the Traders, and Cultivators, answering to 
the Indian castes of the Kshatrya or warriors, Vaishya, 
village (vish) artisans, and Sudras or farmers. 

The day of the procession is the eve of St. Ubaldo's day, 
and therefore a fast. Hence the principal dish at the feast 
held before the procession is one of boiled peas and cuttle- 
fish, the millets and river-fish of the sons of the rivers. This 
is followed by a number of fish courses, the sacramental 
dishes of the fish-sun-god Salli-manu~ or Solomon, who died 
yearly in the constellation Pisces, or the fish, the last 
Nakshatra Revati, and rose again in the constellation Aries 
of the sun-rain as the bearer of the Seal of Solomon, — the 
mystic marriage ring of the Pope, with its nine divisions, 
which was to be the topmost stone of the vaulted roof of the 
heavenly palace of the immortal sun-god built by the Masons 
of the holy craft, who first began the year-palace by arranging 
the bricks of the days of the weeks by which time was 
measured. It is they who rule this Gubbio festival, and who, 
as the widely-disseminated association of Free Masons, have 
adopted the seal of the two interlocked triangles enclosed 

1 Bower, The Procession of the Cert, pp. 6, 7, 65, 66. 



5 5 2 History and Chronology 

in a circle as the signet of the Royal Arch, their highest 
grade. 

This meal is washed down with large draughts of wine, 
which is also, as we shall see, consumed during the proces- 
sion, which takes place in the evening, thus marking it as a 
survival of the early orgiastic festivals to the seasonal gods 
of the setting stars and sun. 

While the Cero of St. Ubaldo is being raised, and before 
the procession starts, water is thrown on it, thus showing 
that the original festival was a national prayer for rain, like 
the water-throwing festivals of the Sal-tree, held at the end 
of March or the beginning of April in India and Burmah. 
The cortege is arranged at noon, and is led by the Captain 
with a drawn sword and a man in a red shirt carrying an 
axe covered with a white cloth, the survival of the double- 
headed axe of Parasu Rama and the Carian Zeus, which had 
cut down the mother-trees carried at the ancient procession, 
when the trees were, like the Kurum or almond-tree of 
Chutia Nagpur, solemnly cut by fasting villagers, who went 
into the forest to seek it. These two march in front of 
St. Ubaldo's Cero, which leads the way, but before starting 
the Cero is turned violently round three times against the 
course of the sun. At first the bearers of the Ceri visit, one 
after another, the houses of a number of prominent citizens, 
and opposite each house the Cero is turned three times as 
at starting. During these visits each Cero takes its own 
independent course, and after them they all meet for the final 
procession at the Piazza Signorina, the town market-place. 
There they have the third meal of the day, the second being 
taken at the various houses they visit. These are the three 
meals of the sun-god of the early mythology of the North, 
breakfast, dinner and supper. 

After Vespers, the final procession begins with the Cero 
of St. Ubaldo in front, followed by St. George the summer 
and autumn saint, next, and by St. Anthony the winter saint, 
last ; and the great bell only rung five times in the year 
announces the time of departure. The Ceri are carried by 



of the My tli- Making Age. 553 

the bearers at a rapid rate, and they start on a sunward 
course round the town till they meet near the South-east 
gate with the episcopal procession. This is led by men in 
white garments with black mourning capes, like the mourning 
worn by the Flaminica Dialis in the Roman procession 
of the 15th of May. They are the attendants of the dead, 
and the death they mourn is that of the departing year. 
They are followed by the members of the Society of Santa 
Croce wearing blue capes, the garments of the day-sun of 
the new year, and after them more mourners in black. The 
last in the procession was the Bishop, who was preceded 
by the Canons of the Cathedral walking behind the picture 
of St. Ubaldo. They began their tour of the town by going 
first Northward, then Westward, and thence by the South to 
the East, so that their course was contrary to that of the 
sun, a course prescribed in Canonical rules for Penitential 
processions x . When they reached the South-east point of 
the circuit at the end of the Via Dante, they were met by 
the Ceri and their bearers, who dash at full pace South- 
wards till the Bishop stops their career by holding up the 
Host, answering to the ancient emblem of the rising sun. 

After acknowledging the holy symbol the bearers with 
the Ceri rush past the clergy till they arrive at the first 
halting-place ; which is, when we consider the extraordinary 
conservatism of ritual, almost indubitably cither the actual 
spot where the first sacrifices were offered in the procession 
described in the Eugubine Tables, or a substitute for it. It 
is at the Palazzo Ferranti, the South-west point of the 
circuit, and therefore the setting place of the sun of the 
winter solstice which rose in the South-east, where the 
Ceri met the clergy. It is on the banks of the stream 
flowing through the city. Here they halt for a draught 
of wine, and the First Captain, mount d on horseback and 
attended by a trumpeter, takes command of the whole bod)-, 
and under him is the Second Captain with two axe-bearers. 

1 Bower, The Procession of the Ceri, p, 125. 



554 History and Chronology 

They, followed by the Ceri, go North and then East to the 
Great Piazza. There a second halt for rest and wine is 
made, after the Ceri have gone several times round the 
Piazza against the course of the sun. They start thence 
for their final halt and a draught of wine at the Porta 
Ingino, leading up to Mount Ingino. They then take the 
Ceri up the hill, and carry them three times round the court 
of the Monastery. The ceremonies end with the lighting 
of the year's fires and, like other ancient New Year festivals, 
with a two days' fair. 

I have now, before closing the account of these May 
Pentecostal processions celebrating the New Year of the 
sun-god enthroned in heaven, to turn to another similar 
festival to that of Gubbio. This is the dancing procession 
at Echternach in Luxemburg, held yearly on Whit Mon- 
day. Echternach is dedicated to St. Willibrod, who died 
there in a monastery he founded after he had converted 
the people of Echternach and its neighbourhood to Chris- 
tianity. He was an English monk who took the vows in 
the monastery at Ripon in Yorkshire, and it was he who 
first converted the Frisians. He came to Trier, the seat 
of the Roman provincial government near Echternach in 
698 A.D., and died in 739 A.D. Echternach, on the right 
bank of the Sauer, had been probably for ages before 
Willibrod came there, the site of a holy well : one of those 
welling forth under the hoofs of the sun-horse, to whom 
the well and the small conical hill rising above it was 
dedicated. It was a typical Celtic site, hallowed by a hill 
sacred to the mountain-mother, and a well near the village 
grove at the foot of the hill. It is in the country of the 
Eburones, whose territory extended from the Eiffel country 
on the North as far South as Lake Neufchatel, of which the 
Roman name is Lacus Eburodunensis, the Lake of the 
fort (dun) of the Eburi, and they ruled the whole of the 
country of the Ardennes. They probably take their name 
from the boar Eber, the sun-boar of Orion's year, and the 
Wild Boar of the Ardennes. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 555 

When Willibrod came to Echternach as a missionary, he 
found, as we are told in his life, that an annual dancing 
festival was held there every year in honour of the sun- 
physician, who gave healing properties to its waters, and 
to whom the conical hill on which the parish church now 
stands was dedicated. The people danced there for three 
days and three nights together, just as they do at the Munda 
seasonal festivals ; and this sun-festival was attended, as it is 
now, by people from a considerable distance, so that it must 
have originated in very ancient times. It was held like that 
at Gubbio at about the same time when the present Christian 
festival takes place ; that is to say, it was a May festival of 
the consecration of the boundaries of holy sites hallowed by 
the healing-sun-god. When the people were won to Chris- 
tianity by St. Willibrod's preaching they agreed to change 
their dancing festival into a Christian procession, but the 
change was really merely nominal, and they substituted the 
name of St. Willibrod in their prayers for health and pros- 
perity for that of the heathen sun-god I . Both here and at 
Gubbio, the clerical teachers, who taught the people to call 
themselves Christians and tried to train them in the practice 
and love of Christian virtues, followed the advice given by 
Gregory the First to St. Augustine and the missionaries he 
was taking to England, and did not alter the festivals of 
the people beyond bringing them, as far as they found it 
possible to do so, to renounce practices denounced as sinful 
by Christian ethics. 

Hence the dance which distinguished the ancient heathen 
procession was still performed at Echternach, with its remark- 
able step of three paces forward and two backwards, and 
its own special music -. It is apparently a survival of the 
ancient Tripudium or measured step of the Dionysian Choric 

1 Die Spring profession und der Wallfahrt zum Grade des heiligen Willi 

in Echternach, von J. Bern ; Krier, Religions lehrer am Progymnasium eu 

Echternach, pp. 66 IT. 

2 Purior, Echternach St. Willibrod ct la Procession dansanle, p. I j ; Krier, 

Die Spring prozession, p. 113. 



556 History and Chronology 

dances, and its five steps point to a connection with the 
Celtic five-days week. It is with this step that the Echter- 
nach processionists now make the circuit of their town, and 
a similar step was probably used at Gubbio, which has now 
degenerated into the running pace of the Ceraioli bearers 
of the Ceri. 

We have a minute account of the procession recorded 
by Brower in 1617 A.D., in his Metropolis Ecclesics TreviricB 
and Annates Trevirenses, which shows that it then differed 
in some respects from that of the present day. It began, 
as now, at the linden-tree of St. Willibrod on the left bank 
of the Sauer, the mother-tree of Echternach, and a linden 
is the sacred tree of almost all villages in Belgium and 
the Eiffel country. There they danced three times round 
the cross of St. Willibrod under the tree facing the crossing 
of the Sauer leading to the town. At Echternach, as at 
Gubbio, there were three special stages in the procession, 
which went sunwise round the town, and this circumambu- 
lation of the cross was the first of the three. The triple 
circuit round St. Willibrod's was repeated in that round 
the interior of the Abbey Church and round the cross 
outside the Parish Church 1 . In the Abbey Church they 
danced under the great chandelier in the centre dedicated 
to the twelve Apostles, and fitted for seventy-two lights, 
to represent, as we are told, the seventy-two disciples sent 
out by our Lord to preach the gospel 2 . This certainly 
looks very much like a survival of the ancient tradition 
of the seventy-two five-day weeks of the year, which were 
still remembered by the very conservative people who have 
kept intact so many old beliefs and customs in Gubbio 

1 Krier, Der Spring fir ozession, pp. 158, 63, 68. 

2 Luke x. 1 — 17. Our version speaks only of seventy disciples, but many 
ancient manuscripts give the number as seventy-two, and this was certainly 
the number recognised by the makers of the Echternach chandelier, unless 
indeed they had the Celtic number of the seventy-two five-day weeks of the 
year in their mind. The original dancing festival was certainly one which had 
descended from the ancient Pre-Celtic Picts and the earlier sons of Dagda 
and Brigit to the Goidelic and Brythonic Celts. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 557 

and Echternach, and, as we have seen in so many instances 
recorded in this work, in all the countries peopled by the 
successive ruling races of the ancient world. 

The arrangement of the procession is most interesting 
and instructive. No one who has seen it can fail to see 
in the demeanour of the processionists that it is looked on 
by all who take part in it as a most solemn religious 
ceremony. In the Middle Ages it was divided into two 
separate services, and the second of these was reserved 
for the creeping penitents, who, like the priests at Gubbio, 
made their way slowly round the circuit, beginning their 
journey by creeping through a hole in a holy stone near 
St. Willibrod's cross, which, like the similar holy stone at 
Anderlecht near Brussels, was supposed to possess healing 
virtues. Sick human beings and Easter lambs used to be 
passed through the Anderlecht stone. The Echternach stone 
was originally about two feet high, and it was raised a 
foot higher by Paschasius, who was abbot from 1657 to 
1667 A.D. 

The pilgrims who attend the festival come from con- 
siderable distances, and the first place in the dancing pro- 
cession immediately after the walking priests, headed by 
the Dean, is reserved for the people of Priim, the capital 
of the Eiffel, about sixty miles from Echternach. For some 
days before Whit Monday pilgrims begin to come in, and 
it is almost more interesting to watch their arrival than to 
see the procession itself. All the pilgrims from each village, 
men, women, boys, girls, and children, come in together in 
one troop accompanied by their village band, and they spend 
their time on the journey in reciting the Litanies of St. 
Willibrod. Certainly all that I met near the town were 
thus engaged, though whether they continually recited the 
services throughout the long journey on foot, that some of 
them had to take, I cannot say. 

The procession begins with a sermon, and in it each 
village takes its allotted place. The men, women, boys, 
and girls, in separate rows for each sex and age, dance in 



558 History and Chronology 

step behind their village band, and take with them their 
village flag. It is a surviving likeness of the processions 
of matriarchal communal villages, each having, like those 
in Chutia Nagpur, their own flag and village musicians ; 
and I am certain that in the days when the pilgrimage 
was made to the healing well of the sun-physician, the 
pilgrims looked on their journey and the ritual of the 
services as an equally holy duty as that their modern 
descendants now perform in the hope of obtaining the 
intercession of St. Willibrod. Any one in those remote 
ages staying in Echternach for some days before the festival 
would have met the villagers coming to the town in groups,, 
reciting prayers to the sun-physician, who, as the Buddha 
of the Vessantara birth, healed the diseases of all those 
whom he was pleased to help. 

The festival ends, like that of Gubbio, with a fair, and 
though no bonfires are lighted at it, yet from the close 
similarity between the two feasts it is certain that those 
who introduced it among the Eburones brought it from 
some town centre, inhabited by a section of amalgamated 
tribes who had formed themselves into the nationality of 
the sons of the Easter lamb, and adopted a new sun-year 
for their national use. Ey these it was regarded as a New 
Year's feast, but when incorporated into the ritual of the 
Celts, who retained their old November year of the Pleiades, 
it was looked on as a holy festival which would bring 
blessings to the country, and accepted without any alteration 
of their previous annual reckonings. These latter, in the 
conservative countries of primeeval times, could only be 
changed by an immigration of the men of the new year 
large enough to make the new comers much more numerous 
and powerful than their predecessors ; and even then the 
change in any of the town-centres, whence all innovations 
started, was first made by the assignment of a special quarter 
to the new comers, wherein, as in the separate divisions of 
the seven hills of Rome, they could follow their own 
ritual. It was only after a long series of quarrels, recon- 



of the Myth- Making Age. 559 

dilations, and general amalgamation of the alien sections 
with each other by intermarriage, that the composite ritual of 
the primitive mythologies which have come down to us were 
made into one national round of annual festivals, embodying 
those of the component tribes united as one state. It is 
as one of these incorporated festivals that the New Year 
processions and verification of boundaries, which began the 
year of the Easter-born sun-god raised to heaven at the 
Pentecost, survive in all countries of Europe, and are retained 
in England in the circuits made round parish boundaries 
in Rogation week. 

To complete the account of this year and to show its posi- 
tion in the history of human developement, marked by the 
successive measurements of annual time, I must close this 
Chapter with a description of the altar of the Garhapatya 
hearth dedicated to this year, and designed in India at 
this epoch as the first of the two brick altars embodying 
the final record of the history of the year told in Hindu 
ritual. 



K. The ritual of the building of the Garhapatya altar of this 
thirteen-montJis year. 

The space for the altar was swept by a Palasha (Btitea 
frondosa) branch, and was sprinkled with the river sand, 
whence the sons of the rivers were born, mixed with salt, 
so as to consecrate it, in the language of the Brahmanas, 
to those united races, sons of the river and sea-mothers, 
who trace their descent from the inner membrane (an/won) 
of the womb of the flax (tuna) mother, the oil-bearing flax- 
plant, the Sesamum orientalc T . The ground for the altar 
was enclosed with twenty-one enclosing stones, the twenty- 
one days of the month of this year, and in placing them 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah. t vii. 1, 1, 1 — 7, vi. 6, i, 24; S.B.E., vol. \li. 
pp. 29S, 299, 252. 



560 History and Chronology of the Myth--Making Age. 





12 


1 


13 




6 


2 


7 




5 


3 


8 




11 


4 


9 




10 



a sunwise direction was to be followed. The bricks were then 
to be laid down in the order .. 

stated in the accompanying 
diagram, representing the altar 
inside the circle of twenty-one 
stones. The first four bricks 
are to be laid down from North ^ 
to South to represent the body 
and arms of the sun-god going 
Southward at the summer sol- 
stice. After these the builder, 
proceeding sunwise, is to place 

the two Western bricks to represent the two thighs, 
placing the Southern brick first. He then goes round 
and places the Eastern bricks to represent the head, 
placing the North bricks first, so that the first eight bricks 
form a cross, representing the effigy of the father of fire 
lying on his back with outstretched arms and his head to the 
East. To complete the year-square, represented by the altar, 
four more bricks are added, the ninth brick in the South-east 
being divided into two parts, so that the whole makes the 
square of the thirteen months of this year, measuring one 
fathom in diameter, placed inside the circle of twenty-one 
stones z . This altar or hearth, is to be built of one layer 
as the womb of life 2 , that of the birth-year of the worship of 
the sun, who was to rise to heaven as the sun-bird born from 
this year of seventeen and thirteen months, the bird of the 
Ahavaniya brick altar, to be described in the next chapter. 
This sun-bird was to be born from this hearth of national 
generation as the offspring of the fire kindled on it, combined 

with that of the fire-pan which was transferred to it. 

1 



Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 1, 1 — 12, 37; S.B.E. 
Ibid., vii. 1, 2, 15 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 315. 



vol. xli. pp. 301 — 309. 



CHAPTER IX. 



The years of eighteen and twelve months, and 
of five and ten-day weeks. 

A. The Hindu year of eighteen months and that of the 
Mayas of Mexico. 

WE have seen in the last chapter that the seventeen- 
months year closing the exile of the Pandavas of the 
Mahabharata, ended before the sacrifice of the sun-horse 
at the full moon of Cheit (March — April), and it was at this 
sacrifice, as we learn from its ritual described in the poem, 
that the eighteen-months year began. These months were 
represented by the eighteen sacrificial stakes set up for the 
victims to be sacrificed to the gods of this year, instead 
of the eleven stakes set up for the gods of the eleven - 
months year of the Apr! hymns. Six of these were of 
Bilva or Bel-wood {^gle marmelos), the sacred tree of 
the sun-physician, and one of the totems of the Bhars. 
Six of Khadira-wood [Acacia catechu), the tree of Kadru, 
mother of the Nagas, of which the eleven stakes of the 
ritual of the eleven and thirteen-months year were made, 
and the wood of the sacred fire-socket or mother of fire T . 
Six of Sarvavarnin or Palasha-wood, the mother-tree of 
the Soma sacrifice of the sun-bird. Besides these, two 
stakes were made of Devadaru {Pinus deodara) wood, of 
which the triangle enclosing the fire on the altar of animal 
sacrifices was made, and one of Cleshmataka (Cordia latifolia), 
the fruit of which is eaten medicinally and for food. It 
furnishes the drug called by Roxburgh Sepistan or Sebes- 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brdh., iii. 4, 1, 20, iii. 6, 2, 12; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 
90, note 5, 151. 

O O 



562 History and Chronology 

tena *. These three stakes were probably added to make 
the numbers of the stakes twenty, or the number of days 
in the month of the eighteen-months year, and twenty-one or 
the number of days in that of seventeen months. A brick 
altar was also built on the sacrificial ground, said to be made 
of golden bricks, and called the Agni Chayana, or altar of 
heaped-up fire. It was ten cubits long and eight cubits 
broad, and was thus an altar of the year of 8 + 10, that 
is, of eighteen months. It was made of four rows or layers 
of bricks and not of five, which, as we shall see, was the 
orthodox number in the great Ahavaniya altar of the Brah- 
manas, and was surmounted by a golden bird in the shape 
of a triangle, to represent the Garuda or Gadura, the sun- 
bull (gud) and sacred bird of Krishna. This Gadura was 
the second son of Vinata, the tenth wife of Kashyapa, born 
from an Qgg, and the devourer of the Nagas 2 . This is the 
earlier sun-bird of Indian ritual, which was originally the 
sun-hen, and differs from the cloud-bird of the brick altar 
of the Brahmanas, which, as we shall see, was depicted on 
its lowest layer. 

This year of eighteen months of twenty days each, divided 
into four five-day weeks, marks the culmination of the ritual- 
istic eras, of which the history is given in the Mahabharata. 
It marks a return to the earlier year of three hundred and 
sixty days and seventy-two weeks, and was the outcome 
of the final victory of the Pandavas fighting under Arjuna's 
banner of the ape-father-god. It denoted the birth of a 
union of originally alien people, comprising in the one 
nationality of the Great Bharata all the different alien races 
of Southern and Northern origin which made up the popu- 
lation of India. It is their history which is told in the eigh- 
teen cantos of the poem. This was the year which was 
taken from India to Mexico in the Bronze Age, which 
lasted in America till after the Spanish conquest. For 

1 Clarke, Roxburgh's Flora Indica, pp. 198, 199. 

- Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Anugzia) Parva, lxxxviii. pp. 222, 223 ; Adi 
{Astika) Parva, xvi. p. 77. 



of the My tli- Making Age. 563 

when the Spaniards came to Mexico the highly civilised, 
learned, and accomplished natives of the country were ig- 
norant of the use of iron, though iron-stone of the purest 
quality abounds all over the Mexican territory x . Hence 
all Indian computations of time and of the ritual of the 
worship of Indian year-gods brought thither must have left 
India before the use of iron was known in that country, 
for if the emigrants had left India in the Iron Age they 
would have brought the knowledge of iron-work, now known 
to all metal-working castes. 

This eighteen - months year is that of the Mayas or 
Toltecs, meaning the architects, and also of four other 
Mexican tribes, the Tzental, Ouiche-Cakchiqucl, Zapotec, 
and Nahuatl, who also used a sacred year of thirteen 
months. These tribes used hieroglyphic characters no 
longer intelligible to their descendants, and unfortunately 
no one has succeeded in finding such an exact clue to 
their interpretation as will enable them to be read easily. 
Each of the twenty days of the month has a name, and the 
first and eleventh days are named after the alligator and 
monkey -god, both of whom held, as we have seen, a promi- 
nent position in Indian Chronography 2 . 

In Mexico the Toltecs, who came from the North, ruled 
the country long before it was conquered by the cannibal 
Aztecs, who governed it when the Spaniards came. But 
these Aztecs, though they became rulers of the land after 
the Toltecs, were probably the descendants of earlier immi- 
grants into America, who belonged, like the Carib canni- 
bals of the West Indian islands, to the Neolithic Stone Age, 
and had not, like the Toltecs, learnt the art of making 
bronze. The level of the civilisation of these men of the 
Bronze Age far exceeded that of other Indian tribes, and 
they never sacrificed human beings, but only animal victims 
on their altar. The cannibal tribes offered human sacrifices, 

1 Prescott, History of Mexico, vol. i. p. 117. 

2 Ibid., chap. iv. p. 92 ; Thomas, 'Day Symbols "I" the Maya Year,' vol. 16, 
Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology t pp. 206, 212, 243. 

2 



564 History and Chronology 

especially of children, to Tlaloc, the rain-god, and they also 
offered special victims, generally captives, who were, like 
those sacrificed by the Khands of Orissa in India, chosen 
for the sacrifice a year before the festival of *Tezcatlipoca, 
the creating-god, at which it took place. During this period 
the victim, like the Meriah victims of Orissa, lived in the 
midst of every luxury and indulgence. The god to whom 
this victim was offered was represented as a handsome 
young man, whose image was made of black stone, gar- 
nished with gold plates and ornaments. His most cha- 
racteristic ornament was a shield polished like a mirror, 
in which he could see the doings of the world reflected r . 
He is represented also as the one-footed Pole Star god, 
bound like Ixion, to the wheel of Time, the Great Bear 2 . 

His description reads very much like that of the ninth 
form of Prajapati, the Kumara or young sun-god, with his 
gold plate, to whom, as we shall see, a human victim, whose 
mouth, nostrils, and ears were stuffed with gold chips, was 
offered at the building of the brick altar of the year-bird. 
These Mexicans also in their chronometry showed a fur- 
ther approach to that of the Pandavas of the Mahabharata, 
for they divided time into cycles of fifty-two years, divided 
into four periods of thirteen years, each answering to the 
thirteen years' exile of the Pandavas. At the close of this 
cycle, which ended with the culmination of the Pleiades at 
midnight in November, the month sacred to the Pleiades in 
India, all fires were put out, and were only re-lighted from 
the fire kindled on the breast of a slaughtered human victim 
taken by the priests to the top of a mountain and there 
slain and burnt on a funeral pyre, lit with the fire kindled 
on his breast at the auspicious moment ; and from this fire 
all the fires in the country were lighted 3. This sacrifice 
probably took place about the new moon of Agrahayani or 

1 Prescott, History of Mexico, vol. i. pp. 9, 10, 62, 63, 70, vol. ii. p. 128. 

2 Zelia Nuttall, Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilisation, 
pp. 9, 10, Papers of ' Peabody Museum, Harvard University, vol. ii. 1901. 

3 Prescott, History of Mexico, vol, i. pp. 105 — 107. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 565 

Mriga-sirsha (November — December), the month which, as 
dedicated to Orion of the deer's {inriga) head (sirsha), was 
intimately connected with that of the Pleiades or Krittakas 
(October — November), and their queen-star Rohinl {Alde- 
baran), for Manu says that all Brahmins should offer the 
Ishti, that is, the new and full-moon sacrifices of new grain 
in Agrahayani, together with an animal sacrifice, and this 
is to be offered at the solstices called Turayana. Hence 
the normal winter animal sacrifice was offered at the end of 
Mriga-sirsha, which closed the night before the winter solstice 
with, as we have seen in Chapter III. p. 89, the death of the 
year-deer *. This special cycle sacrifice, if it was derived by 
the Mexicans from India, was probably offered at the meet- 
ing-point of the solstitial month Mriga-sirsha (November — 
December), and the Pleiades month Khartik (October — 
November), as that on which the union between Orion and 
Rohinl took place, from which Vastospati, the god of the 
household fire, was born. 

In the cosmogony of the Sias, a tribe of artistic potters 
occupying in Mexico a position similar to that of the sons 
of the Great Potter in early European and Asiatic history, 
their descent and that of other Mexican tribes is traced to 
Sus-sistinnako, the Spider. He is the exact counterpart 
of the Hindu Krittikas, the goddess Klrat or Krittida, the 
Spinner, the Pleiades constellation which appears in the 
Vedic birth story of Vastospati, and in the Mexican fire- 
lighting sacrifice at the end of the cycle as the mother of the 
year's fires. Sus-sistinnako, in creating life on earth, sat in 
the South-west quarter of the sun-circle, divided into four 
equal parts by the meal cross of the ploughing-corn-god 
St. George, that is to say, at the point where the sun set 
at the opening of the year of the winter solstice. He there 
sang into life the two seeds he had placed in the North-west 
and North-east quarters. From these were born Now-ut'set, 
the buffalo-mother of the West, and of those who lighted 
their fire with the West stick used to light the fire on the 

1 Biihlcr, Maim, iv. 26, 27, vi. 10; S.B.E., vol. xxv. pp. 133, 200. 



$66 History and Chronology 

Hindu altar ; and Ut'set, the mother of corn and of the race 
born of the deer-sun rising in the East, who lighted their fire 
with the East stick of the four laid in the form of St. George's 
Cross as the kindling-sticks of the tribal fires I . Among the 
tribes born from these mothers, two, the Maya and Nahuatl, 
to whom the Aztecs belonged, had brought with them to 
Mexico the custom of circumcision practised by the Col- 
chians, ancient Egyptians, and some races of Asia Minor 
and Syria, but not by all Semites ; for it was unknown among 
the Phoenicians and Philistines 2 , who, as Kaphtorim or sons 
of the ape Pole Star god, were the Keftenu or Phoenicians 
of Egyptian theology. These Mayas and Nahuatl, both of 
whom use the eighteen-months year, have names very like 
those of the Hindu maritime Maghas or Mughs, the Hindu 
mother Magna, Maya, the mother of the Buddha, and of the 
Nahusha, sons of the Naga snake, whose worship survives 
in Mexico in the snake-dance. This takes place at the great 
August festival, one of those founded by the sons of the 
united buffalo and deer-born races, who inhabited Mexico 
when the Spaniards conquered it. 

B. The antelope and snake-dances of Mexico. 
It corresponds in its ritual with the Hindu consecration of 
July— August to the Naga snake-gods, whose festival, called 
the Naga-panchami or the feast of the five snake-mothers, 
is held on the fifth of Shravana (July — August) ; a month 
also dedicated in Celtic chronometry to the marriage of Lug. 
The whole of a Mexican month of twenty days is devoted 
to this festival, which, in its Celtic form of that of Lug's 
marriage month, lasts from the fifteenth of July to the fifteenth 
of August. The reports of the three village celebrations seen 
by Mr. Fewkes, who visited them as the delegate of the 
American Bureau of Ethnology 3, show that they do not 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., pp. 248 ff., 237. 

2 Ibid., vol. i., Essay v., p. 492; Cheyne, 'Circumcision,' Encyc. Brit., 
Ninth Edition, vol. v. p. 790 ; Bancroft, Native Races of America, vol. iii. 

3 Fewkes, 'Tusayan Snake Ceremonies,' Publications of the Bureau of 
American Ethnology, 1S94 — X895, v °l- xv *- PP- 2 74 — 3°S. 



of the Myth-Making Age. $6y 

begin exactly on the same day everywhere, but that the nine 
ceremonial days of the festival must fall some time in August. 
The dates when these nine days begin, as given by Mr. 
Fewkes, are : Oraibi, nth; Cipaulovi, 15th; Cuiiopavi, 16th 
of August ; and he says that the exact date is determined 
sixteen days before it actually takes place. The first seven 
of the twenty days allotted to it are spent in preparations 
by the priests of the antelope-god. The next nine days, 
each of which has its special name, are devoted to the secret 
ceremonies of antelope and snake-worship, ending with the 
dances held on the last two or last of these days. The 
remaining four days of the month are days of purification or 
general rejoicing, answering to the Hindu orgiastic feasts. 

The directors of the proceedings are the antelope and 
snake-priests, chosen in the village from the members of the 
priestly clan, answering to that of the Pahans or priests 
of the Ooraon villages of Chutia Nagpur. These are the 
descendants of families who have handed down to their sons 
from generation to generation the knowledge of the ritual 
of the national festivals observed in each township, together 
with the words and music of the songs to be sung at them, 
and who thus maintained the unbroken continuity of the 
form of worship established in each village. 

Among the village gods the Mexican antelope-god, answer- 
ing to the Hindu Krishna, the black antelope, occupies a very 
important place. In the Sia cosmogony, of which I have 
given a full abstract in the Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, 
the antelope-god ruled the zenith from the top of the moun- 
tain where he dwelt. He was the last of the old false gods 
of the land killed by the twins Uyunyewe and Ma'ascwe, 
sent by their father with bows and arrows and three rabbit 
sticks, the three seasons of the years of the Mexican cycles 
beginning with the year of the Rabbit \ to banish idolatrous 
worship from the land. These twins successively killed the 
Wolf of the East, the Cougar or Tiger of the North, the Bear 

' Prescott, History of Mexico % vol. i. p, 97. 



568 History and Chronology 

of the West, the father and mother Eagle of the South with 
their offspring, and the Fire-mother of the Nadir, the fire- 
socket, whom they burnt in her own fire. They next attacked 
the Antelope of the Zenith, described as the eater of children, 
the god to whom children were offered. They were led up 
his mountain by the mole, who made an underground way 
enabling them to approach him unseen. Through this hole 
Ma'asewe shot the antelope, who was looking westward from 
below I . He thus killed the antelope-sun-god of the setting 
sun in the same way as Sigurd killed Fafnir, the snake-ruler 
of time, by digging a hole in the path traversed by him 
in his yearly circuit of the heavens, in which he hid himself 
and shot him from below ; as Krishanu, the rainbow-god, 
shot the Shyena-bird in the Pole Star circle at the winter 
solstice. 

These twins play in Mexican historical chronology the 
same part as that assigned to the stars Gemini in the 
zodiacal records of past years. They, as I have shown in 
Chapters VII. and VIII., guarded the gates or months 
through which the sun entered on his yearly course, and thus 
marked the dates of the successive changes in the year- 
reckoning, ritual and doctrines of sun-worship, beginning 
with the birth of the young sun-god at the winter solstice. 
Consequently the death of the antelope in Mexican history 
corresponds with the death, which I shall describe presently, 
of Krishna, and all the Mahabharata gods of the age which 
worshipped the sun as the star of light going round the 
Pole, born as the year-god at the beginning of his year's 
course and dying at its end to make way for his son and 
successor. 

This form of worship of the age of the Mexican twins 
ended with the revels, at which they celebrated their victories 
in feasts, where honey-drink, the Hindu Madhu of the age 
of the Ashvins, was consumed. After this they went up the 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., pp. 266— 
272 ; Stevenson, ' The Sia,' Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 
vol. ii. pp. 52, 53. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 569 

rainbow bridge to their father, the Pole Star god, and were 
succeeded as rulers of time by the sun-god Poshai-yanne, 
born of a virgin-mother made pregnant by eating two nuts 
of the Pinon-tree, the tree reaching up to heaven, down 
which the twins had come from the nest of the Eagle of 
the South. This god born of the nut-tree, the sacred almond 
tree of India and of the Jews, began his career, like the 
beggar sun-god Odusseus, as servant to the Tiamoni, or 
priest-king, the Patesi of the Akkadians ; and won from 
him, by his skill at games, the rule of the regions of the 
North, South, East, West, Nadir and Zenith. He is, as 
I have shown in the complete account I have given of his 
history, the reproduction of the Buddha sun-god of India 
in his final transformation as the immortal and unchanging 
ruler of time ; and his name as completely reproduces that 
of the Chinese Fo-sho, meaning the Buddha, as the Mexican 
year reproduces the Rabbit year of China. That the Indian 
Buddhist birth-stories of the Indian double of the Mexican 
Poshai-yanne were conveyed to Mexico, and received there as 
sacred legends, is proved by the picture of the Buddha found, 
as I have shown in Chapter VII. pp. 471, 472, among the bas- 
reliefs of Copan, representing him as Gan-isha sitting on the 
double Suastika, marking the year sun-god, >and holding in 
his hand the steaming bowl of rice-gruel he received from 
Su-jata as his pentecostal food for the fifty days spent in 
preparing for his ascent into heaven. 

To return to the antelope and snake dance which repro- 
duce the revels of the conquering twins, who ruled time 
before Poshai-yanne. The August festival at which they 
take place is held almost at the same time as the birth- 
day of Apollo Paian, the sun - physician. At it both the 
antelope and snake-priests have " kivas," or closed circular 
shrines, erected for this festival, in which their secret rites 
are carried on. Only the antelope-priests have altars, which 
are made during the first days of the festival according 
to elaborate patterns prescribed by ancient custom. The 
antelope Kiva is placed at the East and the snake Kiva at the 



570 History and Chronology 

West of the road entering the town where the feast is cele- 
brated. The altar is not built of earth or brick but is made 
of sand strewn on the ground, like that scattered on the 
ground where the Garhapatya hearth was built, and the 
oblong figure of sand is adorned with symbolic figures, 
representing horned males and hornless females, and also 
with cloud and lightning symbols. It is bordered with 
bands of sand of different colours. At Oraibi there are two 
antelope-heads placed at the North-east and South-west 
corners of the altar. The antelope-priest is also distinguished 
from the snake-priest by carrying during the ceremonies 
a tiponi or idol. This is called by the Sia Ya'ya, a name 
similar to the Hittite Ya, meaning the full moon, which 
appears in India in the names of the god Yayati and his son 
Yadu, the twin brother of Turvasu, who, as sons of the 
goddess Devayani, rule the Devayana and Pitriyana, the two 
seasons of the solstitial year in the Brahmanic ritual. The 
Ya'ya is said to be an image of Ut'set, the corn-mother, and 
is an ear of maize, the Indian corn, placed in a basket 
woven with cotton-wool and crowned by eagles' and parrots' 
feathers, which completely conceal it. It is renewed at the 
end of every four years, that is, at the end of each of the 
thirteen divisions into which the fifty-two-years cycle is 
divided. This seems to me to be derived from the " Rice- 
child " of the Malays, which it exactly resembles, and to 
be a form of the corn-baby cut as the last sheaf, which is 
common all over the world, and which was almost certainly 
adopted from the Malay Malli, as a symbol of the virgin- 
grain-mother, by the Indian Panchala Srinjayas, or men 
of the sickle {srini ), with which they cut their corn. This 
image of the virgin-mother of corn is placed near the North- 
east corner of the antelope altar, the point whence the sun 
rose at the summer solstice. 

The dances all took place at sunset in front of the " kisi," 
or shrine built of the sacred cotton wood, the Vedic Shalmali- 
tree {Bombax heptaphylla), of which the car of the Indian 
Gemini, the Ashvins, was made. This was placed in the 



of the Myth- Making Age. 571 

South of the piazza or market-place, and in the centre of 
this piazza there was the Pahoki or principal shrine. 

The only public ceremony occurring at sunrise at this 
festival was the snake-race, a reproduction of the Greek year- 
race in which Atalanta was defeated, and won as his bride 
Uz, the victor sun-god, who delayed her steps by throwing 
before her the three golden apples, the ^ three seasons of 
the year. This was run on the morning after the antelope- 
dance, and on- the same day on which the snake-dance 
was danced in the evening. All the circuits made during 
the performances both by the antelope and snake-priests, 
each performance beginning with four circuits, were made 
to the left against the course of the sun. Also the antelope- 
priests at Oraibi wore, like the Hindu and Umbrian priests, 
the sacrificial cord over their right shoulder and a band ofiuool 
round tlie left knee, but no cord was worn by the snake- 
priests. The antelope-chief-priest carried the tiponi or corn 
idol over his left arm, and he also carried in one hand a 
bow with red horsehair attached to the string. This bow 
of the rainbow-god, which became the weapon of the Mexican 
twin-gods, was also carried by the snake-priests, who had 
no idol. 

At the snake-dance, after the four circuits to the left 
had been made, the priests were divided into parties of three ; 
one of each party knelt before the kisi or shrine and there 
received a snake, which he took up and placed in his mouth 
with its head to the left. He then carried it round the 
piazza accompanied by the second priest with his hand 
on his shoulder. When he had reached the end of his 
circuit he took the snake out of his mouth and put it on 
the ground, when it was picked up by the third man of 
the group, who threw it into a ring circled with sacred meal 
and divided into four parts by the cross of St. George, 
formed by meal lines drawn to each of the four points of 
the compass. This is an exact reproduction of the creatin 
circle of Sus-sistinnako in the Sia cosmogony. When all 
the snakes had been carried round the priests rushed into 



572 History and Chronology 

the snake-ring, and each took up as many as he could get 
hold of and threw them outside to the cardinal points as 
marked for them in the meal cross. 

At the antelope-dance the antelope-priest carried in his 
mouth instead of a snake a bundle of corn and vine stalks 
round the ground, just as the snake-priests carried the snakes, 
and he was accompanied by the snake-priest who kept 
his hand on his shoulder. 

In these ceremonies, the evening dances, the left-hand 
circuits, the wearing of the cord on the right shoulder, and 
the binding of the left knee are exact copies of the Hindu 
ritual of the barley-eating fathers. Also the corn-god is a 
reproduction of the Malay rice-child, the first and best 
bunch of seven female ears wrapped up in a white cloth 
like babies' swaddling-clothes, and tied with a cord of 
" terap " bark, which is placed in a small basket and pre- 
served as the soul of the rice to be mixed with the grain 
thrashed from the last sheaf cut at the next harvest I . The 
deity worshipped in these Mexican ceremonies as well as 
the Malay rice-god, and the firstfruits of the corn borne 
in Bacchic processions in the basket called the mystic win- 
nowing basket of Iacchus, the young sun-god, is the germ 
of life infused into the national food by the rain from heaven, 
which i disseminates the indwelling god, giving life to all 
who partake of the rain-born food. 

In these Mexican dances the dancers are the men of the 
village, and not the women dancers, who among the Indian 
Mundas and other cognate tribes keep up the custom of 
seasonal dances ; and therefore they are much more like those 
of the Salii, Dactyli-Kouretes, and other associations of 
dancing-priests of Asia Minor, Greece and Italy, than those 
of the matriarchal races. These latter succeeded the matri- 
archal dances when the family became the national unit 
instead of the village, and it is this stage which has been 
reached by the Mexican tribes, who all live in long houses 

1 Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 225, 226, 249. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 573 

large enough to contain several generations of a family ; and 
their ritual also seems to date from the Kushika age when 
the priests formed guilds, which, after passing through the 
stages indicated by the barber -priests and the Ooraon 
Pahans or village-priest clan, developed into the Indian 
caste of the Brahmins. But these patriarchal tribes retained, 
in their mixed ritual, the ancient seasonal festivals with their 
dances and offerings of fruit and flowers without the sacrifice 
of living victims ; and it was the transition stages of the 
ancient rites which were reproduced in this Mexican August 
festival, answering to that of the Panathenaia at Athens, 
where Athene, the mother-goddess of weavers, received the 
peplos, her woven year-garment. The corresponding Hindu 
age of this festival was that of the Kushika trade guilds, 
the barber-priests of Bengal, Behar and Orissa, and the 
Ooraon Pahan clans ; and the Mexican ceremonies point to 
a ritual derived from the Indian and Malay worshippers of 
the grain-soul and the Naga snake. These latter are called 
in the Rigveda Varshagiras, or praisers of rain as the parent 
of life, and Nahusha, or sons of the ploughing-snake (Nagttr), 
whose name seems, as I have already suggested, to be repro- 
duced in America in that of the Mexican Nahuatl. 

It was the age of the worship of the Great Bear constel- 
lation, which was, as we have seen, as the Thigh of the 
ape-god, the parent of the sun-god ; and that this was the 
traditional epoch of the Mexican immigration is shown by 
the story of the escape of Ut'set, the corn-mother, from the 
lower world to the upper corn land, whither she was led to 
save her and her people from the floods, which, like those 
which nearly drowned the newly-born millet-growing Gonds 
at the sources of the Jumna river of the twins, made her 
ancient home uninhabitable. She made her way up to this 
Mexican reproduction of the Gangctic Doab, enclosed 
between the Ganges and Jumna, by the river reed. The 
way into the corn plateau was opened for her first by the 
locust, and then by the badger. After her came the deer 
and buffalo and the beetle carrying the star bag, which may 



574 History and Chronology 

indicate the epoch of the immigration as that of the thirteen- 
months year of the Egyptian Kheper-Ra, the beetle-sun-god, 
of which I have given the history in Chapter VIII. The 
last comer into the new land was the turkey T . The beetle 
had allowed all the stars to escape except the Pleiades, the 
three stars of Orion's belt, and the seven stars of the Great 
Bear. These last Ut'set placed in the sky as the parent-stars 
of the nation. 

It was thus, according to national tradition, in the age 
of the rule of the Great Bear constellation that these ante- 
lope-born sons of the corn and snake came to Mexico, 
bringing with them the worship of these parent-stars. And 
with the worship of the three stars of Orion's belt they 
brought with them, in a variant form, the Indian story of 
the birth of the Palasha-tree, bringing to earth the sap 
of life sent down from heaven in the blood of the Shyena 
Soma bird of frost (skyd), the Pole Star bird of the winter 
solstice. This story of Krishanu, the rainbow-archer-god, 
the rainbow-father of the Mexican twins, is depicted on the 
cross at Palenque, as is shown in the annexed illustration. 
The stem of the cross is shaped as the feathered arrow, the 
traditional arrow of the three stars of Orion's belt, the three 
seasons of the year. It shoots the turkey seated on the top 
of the cross. On each side of the cross stands a priest, and 
the left-hand priest who is cutting up the slain turkey, to con- 
sult the augural signs. He wears a cap crowned with a 
sheaf of corn and a fleur-de-lys, a reproduction of the trident- 
god, a pig-tail, and a girdle, which is probably tied with the 
three knots of Orion's stars, tying the girdles of Brahmins 
and Asiatic dervishes. 

That the Mexicans were emigrants from a country where 
the ruling races were of mixed Southern and Northern 
nationality is proved by their parent-stars, the Pleiades 
mother of the Southern Indian forest races, Orion parent 



1 Stevenson, ' The Sia,' Publications of the American Btireau of Ethnology, 
PP- 35—37- 



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of the Myth- Making Age. 575 

of the Northern sons of the sun-deer, and the Great Bear 
parent of the wizard races of the West, who adored the 
bear-mother Artemis and sacrificed human victims to her. 
The Naga Kushikas who ruled India in the epoch of Great 
Bear worship, worshipped, like the Mexicans, the moon as 
a goddess, the Gond Pandhari or Mu-chundri, the Greek 
Here or Selene, the Latin Luna ; and the sun as a male god, 
the sun-lizard Skanda, the Greek Helios, the Latin Sol. 
Consequently their theology differed from that of the early 
Kushikas, who worshipped the sun as Ahalya, the hen, who 
was wife to Gautama, the moon-bull, and from that of the 
Vedic hymn, in which Soma, the moon-god, was married to 
Suria, the sun-maiden. The date of the first worship of the 
male sun-god seems to go back to Orion's year, in which 
the sun-god was the male deer of the herd of deer-stars, who 
became the rider on the sun-horse. This was followed by 
the first worship of the male moon-god as the crescent-moon 
bearing the Harpe and beginning the months. But this 
method of measuring time apparently did not penetrate to 
Mexico, and the ruling god of their thirteen-months lunar 
year was the moon-goddess, answering to the Greek Here, 
who in Greek mythology was the ruling goddess before the 
birth of Herakles, the young sun-god, whom she hated ; and 
the stage of belief indicated in the Sia cosmogony as that 
which was the national faith when the Toltecs established 
their rule in Mexico seems to be that which prevailed in 
India during the seventeen-months year, when Skanda was 
the sun-god. And it was at the close of this period that they 
took the eighteen-months year of the Pandavas with them 
to America, which they apparently reached by Behring's 
Straits, whence they made their way along the coast to 
Mexico, though perhaps some adventurous navigators of 
those days may have made their way across the open sea 
to a more Southern part of the American coast than that 
of Behring's Straits. 



) 



576 History and Chronology 

C. Indian history of the epoch following the eighteen-months 
year as told in the Mahabharata. 

To return to the history of India after the introduction of 
the eighteen-months year. The horse-sacrifice which inau- 
gurated it was the last of the orgiastic festivals in which 
animals were sacrificed and spirits drunk as sacramental 
drink by the orthodox Hindu priesthood. It was after this 
sacrifice, according to the Mahabharata, that the revisor 
of the ritual appeared in Nakula the mun-goose, one of the 
two Pandava twins, sons of the Ashvins and of Madrl, the 
intoxicated (mad) prophetess, the second wife of Pandu. 
He was engaged as the trainer of the horses of the king 
Virata during the thirteenth year of the Pandavas' exile, 
which they spent among the Matsyas as the hidden sun- 
gods, that is to say, during the age when time was measured 
by the thirteen lunar months. He as the fifth Pandava was 
the god of the winter season of the year, who trains the 
sun's horses for their yearly circuit round the heavens *. 

He as the sacrificial reformer preached the doctrine that 
" the destruction of living creatures can never be said to be 
an act of righteousness," and that sacrifices should be " of- 
ferings of seeds and liquids, not of animals 2 ." This was one 
of the cardinal doctrines taught by the Jain priests, and was 
in accordance with the rule governing the earliest sacrifices 
of the primitive village races, at which flowers and fruit were 
offered. This primitive sacrifice, with the addition of the 
sacramental Soma or mingled milk, sour milk, barley, and 
water, poured forth as libations to the gods, and drunk by 
the worshippers joining in the sacrifice, was finally accepted 
as the orthodox sacrifice of Indian ritual. At the sacrifices 
held after the new rule was made the law of the land, the 
only drink allowed to those who took part in the sacrifice 
was the vrata or fast milk, which was their only sustenance 

1 Mahabharata Virata {Pandava-pravesha) Parva, sect. xii. pp. 26, 27. 
" Mahabharata Ashvamedha (Attugi(a) Parva, xci. 14, 20, p. 239. 



of the Myth- Making Age. ^yj 

during its continuance x . At the sacrifice itself the sacra- 
mental cup was the mixture of milk, sour milk, barley, and 
running water mixed with the sap of the Soma plant ; and 
it was these ingredients which were offered in all libations, 
except that to Mitra-varuna, in which the libation was of 
Soma and milk -. No intoxicating liquid was allowed to 
be used in any part of the sacrifice. Also it was at this 
time that all high-caste Hindus became, like the Arab sons 
of the date-palm-tree, total abstainers, who thought it dis- 
graceful to drink any spirituous liquids, even the palm wine 
made of the fermented sap of the date-palm-tree, a favourite 
drink in North-western India, being forbidden. 

The inauguration of this new age is described in the 
Mausala Parva, the seventeenth canto of the Mahabharata. 
It is traced to the iron bolt conceived by the hermaphrodite 
Camba, child of the lance (Shamba), and said to be heir to 
Vasu-deva, the father of Krishna, the god Vasu, who set 
up on the Sakti mountains, as we have seen in Chapter IV. 
p. 190, the bamboo pole of Vasu, the Asherah of the Jews. 
This iron bolt apparently denotes the beginning of the Iron 
Age. In order to avert any evil portended by the iron 
thunderbolt, it was ordained that the Vrishnis, Andhakas 
and Bhojas should cease to make intoxicating drinks. But 
this decree did not avert the portents nor prevent the onward 
march of epoch-making time, which showed by the dis- 
appearance of the four sun-horses of Krishna's car that the 
yearly-dying sun, the charioteer of heaven, should rule the year 
no more ; and with the sun-horses Krishna's standard of the 
Garuda or sun-bird and Valarania's banner of the date-palm- 
tree also vanished. The doomed heroes betook themselves 
to Prabhasa, that is to the port of Baragyza or Pragjyotisha, 
the modern Broach, at the mouth of the Nerbudda. There 
they indulged in one last orgy, which ended in a mutual fight, 
in which all the Yadava demi-gods slew one another, and 



' Eggeling, Sal. Br ah., iii. 1, 2, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. pp. 5, 6. 
2 Ibid., iv. 1, 4, 8 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 271. 
P p 



578 History and Chronology 

Krishna joined in the slaughter. When they had all been 
slain, Krishna, sending Daruka, his charioteer, to fetch Arjuna 
as his successor, went to Valarama, whom he found under 
a tree, and watched his death, accompanied by his trans- 
formation into a Naga snake. After the disappearance of 
Rama among the gods of the past, Krishna laid himself 
down to die, and was slain by an arrow shot from the bow 
of Jara, old age, which entered his heel, which was like that 
of the sun-god Achilles, the only vulnerable part of his 
body. 

Arjuna, on his arrival at Dwaraka, collected all the 
Vrishni and Andhaka wives who had lost their husbands, 
and having seen Vasu-deva, father of Krishna, the creating- 
god of the bamboo sun-pole, the tree Asherah, die, he left 
Dwaraka, which was swallowed up by the sea on his de- 
parture. He took the Yadava wives to Indraprastha (Delhi), 
though many of them were taken away by the Abhirya 
tribes, the modern Ahirs or cattle-herdsmen, on the march, 
an incident indicating the amalgamation of alien races, which 
marked the change in religious belief. 

When this duty was done, all the Pandava princes, the 
rulers of the transition age, decided to leave their kingdom, 
resign their sovereignty to their sun-worshipping successors, 
and betake themselves to a life of penance in the woods. 
Yudishthira accordingly gave up his throne to Yuyutsu, 
son of Dhrita-rashtra by a Vaishya wife of the village 
(vish) races, and therefore born of the mixed Northern and 
Southern stocks, who now became the united Hindu nation. 
Yuyutsu, their new king, was the god of the eleventh month 
of the eleven-months year of the Kauravyas, ruled by Du- 
ryodhana 1 . That is to say, he was the equivalent in the 
national genealogical history of Rahulo, the young sun-god 
Rahu, son of the Buddha, and the eleventh Then Bhudda 
Kaccani, the Golden Saint. 



1 Mahabharata {Mahaprasthanika) Parva, pp. i— 10, Adi (Adivanshava- 
tarna) Parva, Ixiii. p. 180. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 579 

The five brethren, accompanied by Drupadi, were followed 
by the dog of Yudishthira, the dog-star Sirius, which had 
ruled the year of the white horse of the sun, that of the Zoi- 
davesta, in which Tishtrya (Sirius), as a white horse pierced 
and slew the black horse, the black rain-cloud of the summer 
solstice I . He was the dog-star to whom the dog-day festivals 
of July and August were dedicated. After Arjuna had cast 
into the sea his bow Gandiva, whence the year-arrows of the 
time-god of the old faith were shot, and his two inexhaus- 
tible quivers of year-arrows, indicating the two seasons of 
the solstitial year, they made the year circuit of the earth 
on a sunwise course. They went first Southward with the 
sun of the summer solstice, and afterwards Westward. 

As they marched onward on their yearly course the god of 
each season died as his season was ended. Drupadi died first, 
as the goddess of the rainy season. Her name, meaning the 
foot (pada) or root of the tree (dru), marks her as the tree 
and corn-goddess of the ploughing Kuru-Panchalas, called 
Srinjaya, or men of the sickle. She is the goddess answering, 
in the cosmogony of the cighteen-months^year of the dying 
Pandavas, to the Mexican corn-mother Ut'set of the Maya 
year of eighteen months, who was superseded as ruler by 
Poshai-yanne, the sun-god born of the nut-tree. She was the 
corn-goddess of the August antelope festival, and the Ka- 
damba or almond-nut-tree-mother of the barley-growing 
Kharwars and Ooraons, who celebrate her festival as the 
goddess of the Kururn almond-tree in July— August. She 
was the tree-goddess who received the Pcplos of Athene in 
August. Sahadeva, the fire-god, god of the autumn, died 
next, and he was followed by Nakula, the winter-god. After 
him Arjuna, the spring-god, died, who had followed the sun- 
horse Parikshit in his circuit ; and the last of the seasonal 
gods to die was Bhima, the summer-god. 

Yudishthira, as the leader of the year-star Sirius, went on 

* Darmesteter, Zevdavesta Tir Yasht, 12—34; S.B.E., vol niii. pp. 

97 — 102. 

I' p 2 



580 History and Chronology 

alone, and was taken up to heaven in the car of Shukra, 
the rain-god. But at first his dog was not allowed to ac- 
company him ; Shukra saying that he was looked on by 
the Krodha-vashas as unclean, that is to say, he was looked 
on as an unclean animal by the Semite moon-worshippers, 
who measured time by the thirteen-months year, and called 
the mid-ruling month of their year Krodha. The dog was 
finally received as the god Dharma, the ruler of law and order, 
the director of the year's course beginning at the summer 
solstice, when the season of Sirius began. 

Yudishthira, when he arrived in heaven, found all those 
whom he had known as rulers on earth and all the heroes 
of the Mahabharata transformed into stars or directing 
powers of nature, as Vyasa, the alligator encircling the 
Pole as Draco, had previously told him would be the 
case r . 

These closing scenes add further proof of the correctness 
of the conclusion conveyed by every part of the poem, that 
it is an allegorical history of India during the ages which 
intervened between the first entry into the country in the 
Neolithic Age of the Northern tribes, who brought in the oil, 
millet and corn crops of Asia Minor, and the close of the 
Bronze Age. The period comprised in the original nucleus 
of the poem, which has been translated from its original 
language and edited and re-edited by many generations 
of Sanskrit-speaking bardic poets, was that of the eleven, 
fifteen, thirteen and seventeen-months years. The object 
aimed at by the original author, who grouped together the 
picture of the events which made the history of these ages of 
progress of vital importance to the nation, was apparently to 
paint, in his panoramic narrative, a vivid and consecutive 
story in dramatic form. The successive acts were repre- 
sented as following one another in an ideal year of eighteen 
months or cantos, culminating in the rule of a new and 
righteous race who had been moulded into a nation in India, 

1 Mahabharata {Acramavasika) Parva, xxxi. pp. 69 — 71. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 581 

and who were to give to it the government which the Pan- 
davas had tried to introduce under Yudishthira, but which 
was overthrown in the epoch of the thirteen-months year by 
the revolt of the Kauravyas. It was then that the rule of 
India fell into the hands of a mixed race, whose theology 
was founded on the worship of the sun-god of the North as 
the god of light and the ruler of annual time. They sub- 
stituted a system of education based on individual self- 
improvement for the communal ethics of the earlier ages. 
And the votaries of the various forms of this new creed 
grouped themselves into associations, which separated them- 
selves in a greater or less degree from the castes or unions 
founded on supposed community of birth or on community 
of function. The religious movement following the intro- 
duction of sun-worship originated, as it has done among the 
Jains, some entirely new castes or communal associations, 
and left certain of the old associations apart, such as the 
Kurmis and Koiris, who were the unitarian believers in 
Kabir, the Pole Star ape-god, whose image was on the 
banner of Arjuna. 

This individualism engendered by the new creed replaced 
in a great measure the teachings of the earlier ages, in which 
all were trained to follow the rules of conduct laid down by 
the heads of their village, their tribe, or their family. And 
the revolution thus caused was the result arising out of 
the increase of wealth which followed the continual ex- 
tension of land and maritime trade brought about by the 
trade guilds ruled by the sons of the date-palm-tree. 

They in their trading voyages settled members of the 
guilds as agents in Western Europe, for it was only a 
resident population who could have set up the calendar 
stones of Carnac in Britany, or made there the multitudes 
of oriented chambered tombs on patterns brought from Asia 
Minor ; and it is Indian and Phoenician theology, derived 
from India, which is, as we have seen, a dominant factor 
in Greek and Roman ritual and belief. And this same 
people also went in large numbers to America, and thus 



582 History and Chronology 

included in their sphere of influence the whole of the then 
civilised world. The prosperity engendered by this world- 
wide trade caused the growth on the shores of the Indian 
Ocean of a population which had become like that depicted 
in that most vivid description of Oriental life, the Arabian 
Nights, There all classes of the community, including the 
kings and their ministers, are engaged in trade ; and when 
a prince or man of high birth falls into misfortune and 
finds himself an unacknowledged outcast in a foreign 
country, he becomes a trader, just as Prince Zan-al-Makan 
in the story of Omar-bin-al Nu'uman and his sons becomes 
assistant to the man who lighted the fires in the public 
baths of Damascus, and Badr-al-Din Hasan, the son of 
the Wazir Nur-al-Din Ali, became a cook and confectioner 
in the same city I . There is little or no indication in these 
stones of the existence of settled landowners holding large 
estates, or of a division of ranks based on birth ; and the 
marriages to the king's daughter of Abdullah the fisherman, 
and Ala-ed-din, the son of a poor widow, when they were 
enriched by the gifts of Abdullah the Merman, and of the 
slaves of the wonderful lamp and ring, are spoken of as 
quite consonant with propriety 2 . All people seem to be 
equal in birth, and to move up or down the scale of rank 
according to their good fortune, their industry or their 
talents ; and they seem to live in the midst of settled 
communities, whose relations were generally peaceable, for 
war is scarcely ever spoken of in this whole collection of 
stories telling the national history as handed down by the 
successors of official framers of historical tales, and depicting 
the characters of the people. In the whole twelve volumes 
of Burton's Arabian Nights there are only two stories, those 
of Omar-bin-al Nu'uman and his sons, and of Gharib and 
his brother Ajib, in which the chief actors are soldiers 3. 

1 Burton, Arabian Nights, ' Story of Badr-al-Din Ali and his son Badr-al- 
Din Hasan,' vol. i. pp. 179 ff. 

2 Ibid., 'Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman,' vol. vii. p. 
237 ff., ' Ala-ed-din and the Wonderful Lamp,' vol. x. p. 33 ff. 

3 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Frehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay ix., pp. 306—310. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 583 

It was only in an age of peace, when the kings and their 
principal advisers were merchants like Anatha Pindika, the 
chief adviser of the king of Sravasti in Buddhist history, 
and the Kewat or fishermen kings of Tamralipti and South- 
west Bengal, that the commerce of the Turvasu-Yadavas, 
sons of the date-palm-tree, with China and the islands of the 
Malay Archipelago on one side, and Syria, Egypt, North 
Africa, Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor, could be kept up. 
But the ruling chiefs of these trading states were not Turano 
Dravidians, but belonged, like the Beni Hanifa, the Arab 
sons of the date-palm-tree, to races of much purer Northern 
descent. For the evidence of their marriage customs proves 
that under their rule the endogamous marriages of the 
Northern Gothic races superseded among the trading 
population of Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and Western India, 
the exogamic unions of the Turano-Dravidians. Almost 
all the heroes and heroines of the stories in the Arabia?i 
Nights are endogamous, and entirely ignore the exogamous 
restrictions of India caste rules ; the marriage most sought 
after was that of first cousins, and the Persian kings, like 
Abram of the Beni Hanifa, used to marry sisters. In India 
similar disregard of the earlier laws which made endogamous 
marriages of near relations or of members of the same gotra 
or village unlawful is shown by some of the castes, who prove 
their Kushika descent by binding the hands of the bride 
and bridegroom together with Kusha grass as the sign of 
marriage. The Kooch Rajbunsi, who are all children of 
Kashyapa, and who are not divided into septs, profess to 
disallow marriages between relations nearer to one another 
than seven generations on the father's and three on the 
mother's side, but they are very lax in the observance of 
this rule, and prefer to marry a daughter of a neighbour, even 
when nearly related to them, to leaving home to seek a wife l . 
But from the evidence of the Satapatha Brahmana we learn 
that in the West of India, among the f Yadu-Turvasu races, 

r Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, vol. i., Kooch, p. 494. 



584 History and Chronology 

who offered the new and full-moon sacrifices of the year 
of seventeen months and five seasons, the marriage laws 
were nearly, if not quite, as lax as to the marriages of near 
relations as those of the people described in the Arabian 
Nights. It says that both husband and wife may, among 
the observers of this ritual, be no more distant from one 
another than the third generation from the common father. 
And Harisvamin, the commentator on this passage, says 
that the Kanvas allow intermarriages fr„om the third genera- 
tion, the Sau-rashitras or trading Saus from the fourth, 
and that the Dakshinatyas, that is the people of the Malabar 
coasts, permit marriage between first cousins either on the 
father's or mother's side J . The Kanvas here mentioned 
are the men of the new (kana) race of priests, who are the 
reputed authors of the Eighth Mandala of the Rigveda and 
the priests of the Yadu-Turvasu, the trading races of the 
Hittite land of Khatiawar. 

A similar state of society to that existing in the lands 
ruled by these peace-loving merchant-princes seems to have 
prevailed among the Mexican Toltecs, whose historical 
mythology is so similar to that of the Antelope and Naga 
races of India, and who measured time by the Pandava 
year of eighteen months. Among them, as among the 
Kushikas, each trade had its own guild, a special quarter 
of the city was appropriated to it as in Indian bazaars, and 
each guild was ruled by its chief, and worshipped its own 
tutelar deity at the festivals held as enjoined in the guild 
ritual. The profession of artisan was looked upon as es- 
pecially honourable, and the merchants held the highest rank 
in the state. Those who traded to foreign countries travelled 
in caravans guarded against attack by an armed escort, which 
was sometimes so large as to amount to an army, as in the 
case where a trading caravan stood a siege of four years in 
Ayotlan and finally were left in undisturbed possession of the 
town. These traders assumed insignia and devices of their 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 8, 3, 6 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 238, note 1, 239. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 585 

own, like the banners of the Yadu-Turvasu chiefs, and in 
Tezcuco they controlled by a council of finance the expen- 
diture of the State. They were called " Uncle" by the king, 
and held their own courts both for civil and criminal 
cases x , and they were, in short, the chief rulers of the 
land. 

The supremacy in India of the merchant traders seems to 
have originated in the age of the fifteen-months year, when 
the Northern sun- worshippers reorganised the country after 
the disturbed age of that of eleven months, and it was under 
their rule that standing armies for defensive purposes begun 
to be entertained. These were, as I have shown, organised by 
the chiefs of the border provinces of each state, and were 
only clansmen trained in military exercises, who appeared at 
musters, but, when not summoned for duty, were ordinary 
husbandmen engaged in the cultivation of their lands ; and 
there is no evidence that the trade of soldier was looked 
upon in those days as a separate profession ; the people were 
all Vaishya or men of the villages. 

D. The conquest of the Bhdrata merchant-kings by the 
Sanskrit-speaking suu-ivorsJiippcrs. 

The rule of these peace-loving merchant-kings of the 
of Sallimanu or Solomon, the fish-sun-god, was that of the 
epoch when the year began with the entry of the sun into 
Gemini at the vernal equinox, that is between 6000 and 7000 
B.C., when the Pole Star was in Hercules. It was apparently 
at the close of this age, when the sun entered Taurus at the 
vernal equinox, about 4000 B.C., that the iron bolt introducing 
the Iron Age descended in the irruption of the poor hut 
warlike races of the North, who coveted the wealth oi th< 
prosperous traders. An invasion ending in a dislocation ol 
the allied confederacy ol the trade guilds and the separation 
of the united links of the chain of alliance.-, which bound 

1 Prescott, Historv oj Mexico, vol. 1. chap. v. pp. 124 126. 



586 History and Chronology 

together the merchant states into alien kingdoms, each of 
which looked on its neighbours not as friends, but as foes 
meditating projects of conquest. The history of this war 
which made the Sanskrit-speaking races, who called them- 
selves Arya, or the noble people, the rulers of India, is told 
but very cursorily in the Rigveda and the national chronicles. 
In the history of the war between the Kauravyas and Pan- 
davas they appear on the side of the Kauravyas as the 
Sarasvatas, led by Uluka, the owl, the son of Shakuni, the 
raven-mother-bird. They formed the last remnant of the 
Kauravya army destroyed on the eighteenth day of the 
battle by Sahadeva, the fire-god, and Nakula, the mun-goose, 
the two Pandava twins *. Their name shows that they had 
then become settlers in the holy land of the Kuru-kshethra, 
between the Sarasvatl and Drishadvati. They appear in the 
Rigveda as the Arya, who, with their allies the Arna or men 
of the Aruna or fire-drill, and the Chitra-ratha, or sons of the 
star Virgo (Chitra), the mother of corn, were defeated by the 
Yadu-Turvasu on the Sarayu or Sutlej, and this war shows 
them to be the enemies of the trading Hittite races, who 
ruled the country as the merchant kings 2 . 

But it is in the story of the battle of Sudas and the Tritsu, 
the people who make fire by rubbing (trit), with the ten 
kings of the Bharatas, that we find the most satisfactory 
account of the war. Sudas, the king of the Tritsu, is called 
the son of Divo-dasa, that is, of the ten (das ha) months 
of gestation, and Divodasa is called the son of Vadhri-ashva, 
the gelded-horse, the sexless sun-god of the fifteen-months 
year and of the river-mother Sarasvatl 2 . This king is the 
son-god, the giver (das) of Su, the sun-bird, descendant 
of the river-mother, whose name as the goddess Shar was 
brought to India by the fire-worshippers of Asia Minor, who 
first adored her as the tribal river-goddess of the Harah-vaiti 



1 Mahabharata Udyoga ( Yana-sandhi) Parva, lvi. p. 202, Shalya (Shalya* 
badhd) Parva, xxviii. pp. 106, 107. 

2 Rg. iv. 30, 17, 18. 3 Ibid. vii. 18, 25, vi. 61, I. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 587 

of Herat in Kandahar, the tenth of the good lands, created 
by Ahura Mazda I . Hence he was the sun-god of the 
Bactrian races of Ragha, the Asiatic home of the worshippers 
of the sun-god Ra, the speakers of the inflexional languages 
of North-western Europe. 

His prophet-priest was Vashishtha, who was, as wc have 
seen in Chapter VII. p. 396, the god of the sacrificial flame 
on the altar, and the father of the sun-god Aurva, born 
of the Thigh-stars of the Great Bear. 

The Bharatas, foes of the Tritsu, were the followers and 
sons of Vishvamitra, the god of lunar time, and opponents 
of Vashishtha, priest of the sun-god, whose cows of light he 
stole. He was the father of Sakuntala, the bird-mother of 
the Bharata, the offspring, as we have seen, of the three- 
years cycle. 

Hence the two armies which were to contend for the rule 
of India were those of the fire and sun -worshippers, the 
invaders from the North, and those of the lunar-solar race 
of the Bharatas and Kushika Khati or Hittites, who en- 
tered India in the epochs of the three-years cycle, and the 
eleven-months year, and who had amalgamated themselves 
with the previous dwellers in the land, and established the 
lunar-year of thirteen, and the lunar-solar year of seventeen 
months together, with the government of the merchant kings 
of the Ikshvaku and Yadava races. 

The list of the tribes on each side is given in the graphic 
account of the decisive action of the war told in the battle 
hymn, Rg. vii. 18, attributed to Vashishtha. There the 
leading tribe of the sun-worshippers is called Tritsu, but in 
Rg. vii. 33, 1 — 6, and vii. 83, 1, these Aryan conquerors 
of the Bharatas arc called Pritha-Parshu. This name shows 
them to belong to a mixed tribe formed from the union of 
the Parthians with the Persians or Parsis, the fire- wor- 
shippers. These Pritha are the sons of Pritha, the Pandava 
begetting (A 77/ ) mother, also called KuntI, the lance, and 

1 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendldad Fargard, i. ij ; S.B.E., vol, iv. p. ) 



588 History and Chronology 

throughout the Mahabharata the Pandavas, and especially 
Arjuna, are called Partha or Parthians. They, the sons 
of the begetting (pent) mother, born, like the sons of Pritha, 
the virgin made pregnant by the gods without the inter- 
vention of a human father, were originally the sons of the 
mother-tree. Their name of Parthava the Parthian is given 
in the Rigveda to Abhyavartin Cayamana, who, as leader 
of the Srin-jayas or Panchalas, conquered the Vrishivans or 
Yadavas and the Turvasu at Hariyuprya, the sacrificial 
stakes {yupa) of Hari or Shari, that is Mathura I . Also in 
the Periplus Minnagora, the port on the Indus which suc- 
ceeded Patala, is said to be ruled by the Parthians 2 . In the 
Rigveda Parshu is used as the name of a tribe in the passage 
where Tirindira is called the Parshu 3, and in the feminine 
form Parshu, whose name means also the ribs or a crescent- 
shaped knife, is said to be with Manavi, the daughter of 
Manu the measurer, the mother of twenty sons, which 
may be the twenty days of the month of the eighteen-months 
year 4. These Parthians and Persians are clearly the men 
of Central Asia, also called Scythians or Sakyas, the name 
of the clan in which Siddartha Gautama, the real living 
Buddha, was born. They were the fire-worshippers of the 
Zoroastrian birth-land of Ragha or Media, who had invaded 
India and established themselves on the Sarasvati as San- 
skrit-speaking immigrants into the country of the Turano- 
Dravidians. 

The allies of the Tritsu, named in Rg. vii. 18, are: (i) The 
Paktha, (2) Alinas, (3) Bhalanas, (4) Vishanin, and (5) Shiva. 
The Paktha are clearly the people called by Herodotus 
Paktues, who, he says, wear goat-skin tunics, and are armed 
with bows and daggers. He describes them as Bactrians, 
whose native home was near Armenia, but who had settled 
in India, and occupied the city of Kaspaturos, that is Multan, 
or the place of the Malli, which they called the city of 

1 Rg. vi. 27, s, 7, 8. 

- Periplus, 38; Zimmer, Alt Indisches Leben, p. 433. 
Rg. viii. 6, 46. 4 Ibid., x. 86, 23. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 589 

Kashyapa, said by Hecataeus to belong to the Ghandari, the 
native tribes of Kandahar 1 . They are, in short, the Afghan 
Pathans or mountaineers, who speak Pushtu, that is the 
Paktian or Pushtian language. It belongs to the Indo- 
European family of inflectional languages, but, like that of 
their Sanskrit and Zend-speaking allies, it uses the Dravidian 
cerebral letters, thus showing that they, who when they 
invaded India married Dravidian wives, had children who 
learnt to speak their Northern tongue with a Dravidian 
accent. 

These Afghans, with the Parthians and Persians, were the 
leaders of the invading armies of Sudas, who brought into 
India the iron-bolt which destroyed the confederacy of the 
Yadavas and Bhojas, and dethroned their year-god Krishna. 
For the Bhavishya Purana tells us that Shamba, the son 
of Krishna, brought Magian priests from Saka-dwipa to 
officiate in the temple of the Sun at Multan 3 . This Shamba, 
the throwing spear or javelin of the Sakyas and Homeric 
heroes, was the tribal symbol carried in front of their armies 
as the united fire-drill and socket of the American warrior 
Indians, and it in its female form as the fire-socket was the 
Shamba who brought forth the iron-bolt which destroyed 
the empire of the Vishnuite merchant-kings of the Western 
sea-board. 

The whole story, when translated from allegorical language 
to a plain statement of facts, tells how the worship of the 
old gods was overthrown by the fire-worshippers from Saka- 
dwipa, the land of the Sakyas, who substituted temples in 
the sun for the shrines dedicated to the crcating-god, who 
descended from the mountain-tops wreathed with mist to 
bring to earth the rain-water which was to Till tin rivers 
and fertilise the soil with the germs of life, and who 
the Pole Star father-god, the creating goat, ruled time and 

1 Herodotus, iii. 93, 102, vii. 67; A. Weber, India and 
Days, p. 6; Hewitt, 'Early History of Northern [ndia, Pari Li. f.K.A.s.. 
1889, p. 224. 

1 A Weber, India and the West in Old Days, p. 20. 



590 History and Mythology 

made the moon and sun measure the year by moving round 
the heavens in the star-marked path he bade them tread. 

Thus this historical tale tells us of the Aryan invasion 
as an irruption led by the nomad warlike tribes of Scythia, 
the early Persian races, who were taught to ride, shoot with 
the bow, and speak the truth, and of whose language the 
Vedic, Sanskrit, Zend and Pushtu are dialectic forms. 

These Northern invaders as they settled in the country 
found allies in the Alinas, Bhalanas, Vishanin, and Shiva. 
The two first I am unable to identify, but the Vishanin seem 
certainly to be connected with the god Vishnu, and the 
votaries of Vishnu, who allied themselves with the sun- 
worshippers, must be those who Worshipped him as the 
sun-god of the eight-rayed star, the eighth son of Vasudeva, 
the year-god of the fifteen-months year who was born in 
Mathura. They were the tribe also called the Shura-sena 
or army of heroes, who are named in the Mahabharata and 
Manu as adherents of Krishna, who lived near Mathura 1 . 
They were the class of Rajputs called the Agni-kulas or men 
of the fire family. They are called in the Vaya and Matsya 
Puranas the Saisa-nagas, and belong to the Gaur Tagas, 
a mixed race allied to the Gonds and the Jat Takkas, who 
were supporters of the Buddhist doctrines 2 , and whose parent- 
king Sisu»nag was the first of the traditional Chiroo kings 
of Magadha. 

The Shiva are undoubtedly the shepherds and cattle- 
herdsmen whose god was the white {svetd) Shiva, the three- 
eyed bearer of the trident, and the Pinaka bow-husband of 
the weaving-goddess Uma {flax). He was the son of UshT- 
nara, the man-god {iiara) of the East, and the shepherd- 
god of the pastoral races who had been the earliest invaders 
of India from the North, and who were the Takkus or 
Tri-gartas who marched under the banner of the Yupa, 

1 Mahabharata Sabha (Rajasuya-ra?nbha) Parva, xiv. pp. 46, 47 ; Biihler, 
Manu, ii. 19, vii. 193; S.B.E., vol. xxv. pp, 32, 247. 

2 Beames, Elliot's Memoirs of the Races of the North- Western Provinces of 
India, vol. i., Gaur Taga, pp. 108, 109, vol. ii. p. 77. 



of the Myth-Making Age, 591 

or sacrificial stake borne by Bhuri-shravas, the grandson of 
Vahlika, their leader and brother of Shantanu. His name, 
meaning the man of Balkh on the Oxus, shows his Bactrian 
origin. They are named in the Rigveda, x. 59, 10, the 
Ushinara, and are said in the Aitareya Brahmana to live 
in the middle country, the Gangetic Doab, with the Kuru- 
Panchalas *. They are called the Scboi in the history of 
the Indian campaign of Alexander the Great, and Strabo 
places them near Multan, between the Indus and Acesincs 
(Chinab) 2 . They are thus the early worshippers of the 
household fire Agni Vaishvanara, the fire of the men (nam) 
of the villages (visit), the Northern cultivators who now 
allied themselves with the new comers who had added the 
worship of the sun-god to that of the holy fire. 

The invading Aryan forces therefore included the Par- 
thians, Persians, and Pathan hill tribes, led by the Scythians 
of Medea and North Persia, who had allied themselves in 
India with the cattle-herdsmen and corn-growers of the 
central country of the Gangetic Doab, the Shiva or Tugra, 
and the Srinjaya Panchalas. 

Their opponents were the Bharata followers of Vishva- 
mitra, the father of Bharata's mother Sakuntala, and the 
protecting god of the mad-star king Kalmasha-pada, he of 
the spotted (kalmashd) feet, whose epoch was, as we have 
seen in Chapter VI., that of the eleven-months year. These 
Bharatas are called in Rg. vii., 18, 18, 19, the Bheda, that 
is sons of the cleft (bheda), the female symbol, the yoni 
of the linga. Hence they were the Linga worshippers, the 
followers of the bisexual parent gods, whose goddess-mother 
in Syria was Tirhatha, the cleft. 

The ten tribes led by their ten kings, the ten lunar months 
of gestation, were : (1) The Turvasu, whose leader is called 
Puro-dasa, the sacrificial rice-cake offered at the New and 
Full Moon sacrifices of the scvcntccn-months year to Pushan, 



1 Act. Brdk., 8, 14; Zimmcr, Alt Indisches Let 1 

2 Diodorus, 17, 19; Strabo, xv. S. 



592 History and Mythology 

the hands of Savitri, that is to Push, the first month of the 
year 1 . This cake is called in Rg. vii. 18, 19, the Yakshu, 
that is the firstfruits offering of the year of the moving or 
hunting (yaksh) sun-star going round the Pole Tur. Hence 
Puro-dasa, the leader of the Turvasu, seems to be the leading 
god of their year, the god of its first month. (2) The Matsya 
sons of the eel-fish-god born of Adrika, the sun-hawk in the 
river Tamas, the darkness, whence their eel-parents Matsya 
and Satyavati passed, as we have seen in Chapter IV. p. 191, 
into the Yamuna or Jumna, where Satyavati, as wife of Shan- 
tanu, became the mother of the Kauravyas and Pandavas. 
(3) The Bhrigu, the original fire- worshippers, who also adored 
the linga. (4) The Druhyu or sorcerers, sons of the Vedic 
witch-goddess Druh, the Druj of the Zendavesta. (5) The 
Vaikarna or two (vz) horned (karnd) people, whose country 
Vi-karnika is identified by Hema-chandra with Kashmir. 
They were the Naga races, worshippers of the two-horned 
sun-god Kama. Their twenty-one warriors are said in 
Rg. vii. 18, n, to have been slain by Su-das, who thus, as the 
sun-god of the new era, slew the twenty-one days of the 
month of the seventeen-months year. (6) The Anu. (7) The 
Purus. These two tribes and the Druhyu were the descen- 
dants of the three sons of Yayati and Sharmishtha, the 
mother-banyan-fig-tree of the lunar races, speakers of non- 
Aryan languages, as shown by the epithet mridha-vac applied 
to the Purus in Rg. vii. 18, 13, meaning the speakers of the 
soft Dravidian speech. (8) The Ajas or sons of the goat, the 
Pole Star goat-god of the cycle-year. (9) The Shigru, whom 
I am unable to identify. (10) The Yakshus. These are 
certainly identical with the very ancient race who in Greece 
called the young sun-god born at the Eleusinian mysteries 
Iakkhos, which is the same word as Yak-shu. The name 
of this parent-god (ca/cxos) also appears in that of the 
Akkadian la-khan, the fish-god, that is the sun-god who at 
the close of his annual circuit through the heavens marked 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., i. 2, 2, 1—4, i. 6, 2, 5 ; S.B.E., vol. xii. pp. 42, 43, 162. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 593 

by the stars of the Hindu Nakshatra emerged as the sun -fish 
from the constellation Revati Pisces to become the sun-god 
of the new year in Aries. This god, the ever-living fish, was 
the sun-god of the cycle formed by the procession of the 
equinoxes, beginning with the entry of the sun into Aries 
at the autumnal equinox. In this cycle, after each of the 
other zodiacal stars have in their turn become the star in 
which the sun enters at the autumnal equinox, the sun returns 
to the original Aries, which opened the original cycle-year 
24,400 years before. The name of the father-god of these 
Yakshu, who measured the year by the passage of the moon 
and sun through the zodiacal stars of the Nakshatra, is in 
Genesis Joktan or Jokshan, the mover or advancer {yak), 
who in one account of his birth was the son of the Iberian 
father Eber, and the brother of Peleg, the stream, in whose 
time the earth was divided into the lands of the sons of the 
rivers, and of the worshippers of the moon and sun, who 
measured their year by their passage through the stars. In 
another genealogy Jokshan is the son of Keturah, the encir- 
cling {ketur) or incense-mother, the eastern wife of Abram r . 
His thirteen sons are called the children of Shcm, the name 
of God, that is of the bisexual mother Shemi-ramot, and 
their Eastern boundary was the mountain of the East, the 
Akkadian Khur-sak-kurra, and the Kushika mother-moun- 
tain. Two of their thirteen sons were Havilah and Ophir, 
representing the Indian lands watered by the Indus, the 
Sindhu, and the Yavana of the Mahabharata. These Yakshus 
thus belong to the tribes of South-western Asia, who as the 
astronomical Indian tribes and the Chaldaeans of Babylon, 
whose Indian origin I have shown in Chapter II. p. 48, were 
careful observers of the stars. The)- founded the Babylonian 
Zigurats or towers of observation. They mapped the annual 
and monthly paths of the sun and moon in the Hindu 
Nakshatra, and the Arabian and Saba:an lists of Lunar 
mansions. Their year-god was the antelopc-sun-god Krishna, 
the bearer of the discus or year-circle of zodiacal stars, and 

1 Gen. x. 25— 31, xxv. z. 

Q q 



594 • History and Mythology 

they were thus the Yadavas, who measured their year by thir- 
teen lunar-months ; a year-measurement which, as we have 
seen in Chapter VIII., was very ancient, and which became 
in the solar-lunar chronometry of the worshippers of the sun 
of the eight-rayed star, the seventeen-months year. 

Hence we see that the army of the Bharata was composed 
of the pre-Sanskrit races of the Turvasu - Yadavas, the 
Druhyu, Anu and Puru, that is of the five tribes descended 
from Yayati, DevayanI and Sharmishtha, who were the 
Kushika, ruled by the Khati or Hittites, the founders of 
the mercantile dynasties, together with the Bhrigu, wor- 
shippers of the fire and the linga, the Vaikarna Nagas, 
worshippers of the horned sun-horse, and the Ajas, wor- 
shippers of the Pole Star goat. These tribes, representing 
the rich trading population who ruled the rivers and sea- 
coasts of India, united to overthrow the Northern sun-wor- 
shipping invaders, whose indigenous allies were the corn- 
growing farmers of the country villages and the shepherd 
and pastoral races. It was a war of the rude inland 
population against the traders and artisans, who had founded 
the commerce of the country. 

The most graphic account of the combat is that given 
in the war-song of the Vashishtha party, Rg. vii. 18, a poem 
which re-echoes the battle paeans telling the victorious sun- 
worshippers of the glorious deeds of the hero-soldiers of the 
sun. It, with the two other Vashishtha poems telling of the 
war, Rg. vii. 33 and 83, and the Vishvamitra hymn, Rg. iii. 
33, sums up in one battle, in which Su-das overthrew the 
ten kings, the story of what was doubtless a contest pro- 
longed for many years. The Bharata kings, the rulers of 
the land, led the army they collected to drive out the 
Sanskrit-speaking intruders who had settled on the Saras- 
vati, whence they could command the navigation of the 
Jumna, and paralyse the trade both of the Jumna and 
Ganges, by seizing Kosambi at the junction of the two 
rivers, which became the capital of the Sakya kings 1 . The 

1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 391 ff. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 595 

importance attached to the Jumna by both parties is proved 
in Stanza 19 of Rg. vii. 18, where Indra is said to have 
helped the Yamuna and Tritsu. 

It was to oust the invaders from the land between the 
Sarasvati and DrishadvatT, whence they commanded the 
very important strategic post of Indra-prastha, or Delhi, on 
the Jumna, that the Bharata attacked the Tritsu from the 
North-west, and collected their forces in the country as- 
signed by Arrian to the Kathi or Hittites r , between the 
Purushni or Ravi and Chinat. The Tritsu and their allies 
were assembled south of the Beas or Vepash, and the Sutlej 
or Shatudri, and it is to these two rivers that Vishvamitra, 
in Rg. iii. 33, prays to give an easy passage to the Bharata 
forces. But the Tritsu would not await the attack of their 
antagonists, and determined to be themselves the attacking 
party. Hence they marched through the country of their 
allies the Trigartas or Shivas, lying between the Beas and 
Sutlej, the modern districts of Jalandhur and Hoshiarpur, 
and found the Bharata encamped on the north bank of the 
Purushni or Ravi. They were surprised and confused at 
the appearance of their enemies, and rashly determined to 
cross the river and destroy them. But in their hurry they 
failed to find a practicable ford, and rushed into the rapidly 
flowing stream, " thinking," according to the picturesque 
language of the warrior bard, " fools as they were, to cross 
it as easily as on dry land ; but the lord of the earth, 
Prithivi," the parent-god of the Parthians, " seized them in 
his might, and herds and herdsmen were destroyed." They 
were thus easily and completely routed by Su-das, who fol- 
lowed up his victory by crossing the river and taking their 
seven cities. Here the narrative ceases to be the dramatic 
tale of an eye-witness and becomes the historical story of 
the conquest of the Bharata year-god by a god introducing 
another epoch. Hence the seven cities were the seven days 
of the week of the thirteen and seventeen-months year, just 

1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, pp. 215 IT. 

Q q 2 



596 History and Chronology 

as the twenty -one Vai-karna champions slain by Su-das 
were the twenty-one days of the month of the latter year. 
Su-das established himself as the year-god who divided the 
goods of the Anu and Druhyu among the Tritsu, conquered 
the Purus, and made the Ajas, Shigrus, and Yakshus pay 
horses' heads as tribute x . 

But to understand the history of this momentous war 
clearly we must turn to the account given of it in the 
Mahabharata, where the Vedic Su-das, the giver of Su, the 
sap of life, the year-god, descended from the Sarasvati and 
Vadhri-ashva, the gelded-horse, the sexless sun-god of the 
fifteen-months year, is called Samvarana. This name means 
the Place of Sacrifice, the ground consecrated as the site 
of the national altar of the year, said in the Brahmanas to 
represent the whole earth 2 . The creating spirit-god, Sam- 
varana, whose earthly dwelling-place is the central national 
altar, is the giver of the Su or germ of life. Samvarana is 
mentioned once as an individual in Rg. v. 33, 10, where 
he is called the Rishi, the antelope -god, "who gathers 
wealth by his might, to whose stalls the cows (of light) 
come," that is to say, he is the sun-god. This will appear 
still more clearly when we examine his genealogy, the 
history of his reign, and the story of his marriage to 
Tapatl. In the Mahabharata he appears as the ruler who 
was summoned by Vashishtha to reign as the supreme 
king of the Bharatas, and as the father of Kuru, in whose 
name the holy land, watered by the Sarasvati and Drish- 
advati, was consecrated as Kuru-kshetra, the field of the 
Kurus. This was, as we have seen, the land of Taneshur, 
where the mother-tree, born of the southern mud {tan), 
emerged on earth as the mother-banyan-fig- tree, the tree 
of Sharmishtha, the wife of Yayati. But to bring out fully 
the meaning of the history we must look to the ancestry 
of Samvarana. 

1 Rg. vii. 18, 19. 

2 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., iii. 7, 2, 1 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 175. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 597 

He is directly descended from Bharata, son of Dushmanta 
and Sakuntala, who was, as we have seen, p. 280, born as the 
son of the three-years cycle, that is as the god of the eleven- 
months year. Hence his reign, according to the genealogist, 
was a time of confusion. He begat nine sons, the nine 
days of the week of the cycle-year, but slew them, and 
remained childless till, by the help of Bharadvaja, the 
sun-lark, the father of Drona, the holy Soma tree-trunk, 
he became the father of Bhumanyu, the son of the soil 
(bhuman), who ruled in the epoch of the eleven-months year 
the united races of the Kurus, the Northern conquerors 
and the previous dwellers in the land. Bhumanyu's son was 
Su-hotra, the pourer (hotra) of Su, a name equivalent to 
that of Su-das, the giver of Su, and his son was Aja-midha, 
the warring {mldha) goat (a/a), who is said in Rg. i. 67, 5, 
to sustain the earth. The word aja (goat) also means creator, 
and in Rg. v. 82, 6, he is said to be the creating germ 
taken by Visvakarman, the maker (karman) of living things 
(visva) from the waters whence all the gods were born. 
He found himself alone in the navel of the unborn where 
all life is hidden. In other words, this creating father-goat 
is the germ of life, the Chinese Tao, dwelling in the navel 
of the heavens, the Pole Star, surrounded by the mists of 
the mother waters. This Pole Star creating-god married 
DhuminI, the daughter of smoke (d/mmo), the sacrificial 
flame on the Southern altar of burnt-offering, which dis- 
seminated life-giving heat through the world. From her 
was born Riksha, the constellation of the Great Bear, who, 
as we have seen, begot as the Thigh of the ape-god, united 
with the Pole Star goat, the sexless sun-god of the year of 
fifteen months, the god of the sons of the date-palm-tree. 
This was the god Samvarana, who was in his first Avatar 
the sexless sun-god of the fifteen-months year. He, accord- 
ing to the genealogist, was attacked by the Panchalas with 
ten Akshauhinis of troops, those of the ten months of 
gestation of the cycle-year, and driven to the forests at 
the foot of the Himalayas on the banks of the Sindhu or 



598 History and Mythology 

Indus. There he remained childless and in exile for a 
thousand years, during the rule of the mercantile kings 
of the seventeen and thirteen - months year, till he was 
brought forth by Vashishtha, who set him on the throne 
as the ruling sun-god of a new era I . His return to power 
as the conquering sun-god who was to unite the new sun- 
worshippers with the Bharata is told in the story of his 
marriage to Tapati, the heating {tap) mother. She was 
the daughter of Vivasvat, the god of the two lights called 
Surya, the sun, and was the younger sister of Savitrl the 
sun-maiden. She was the mother-goddess of the South, 
the home of the Southern sun, whence it brings heat to 
the earth. Samvarana, who as the rising sun of the coming 
era awaited his hour of enthronement in the forests of 
the South, died there for love of this goddess, and lay 
insensible for twelve days, till he was recalled to life 
by Vashishtha, as the Ribhus, makers of the seasons, 
were awoke by the dog sent by the Pole Star goat, after 
sleeping twelve days in the house of Agoya, the Pole Star 2 . 
Vashishtha united the reborn sun-god to Tapati, the sun- 
goddess of the winter solstice, and thus made him a year 
sun-god, who reproduced the year of Orion in which the 
sun-god slept for the last twelve days of his year 3. 



E. The twelve-months year of the sun-worshippers. 

The year of this sun-god was like that of Orion, one 
of twelve months and three hundred and sixty days, but 
it was not, like Orion's year, divided into months of twenty- 
nine days, but into thirty-day months, and it was not 
measured by seventy-two five-day weeks, but by thirty- 
six weeks of ten days, the decades of the Egyptians and 
Athenians. These were the weeks of the two hands ex- 

1 Mahabharata Adi (Sambhava) Parva, icciv. pp. 279 — 281. 

2 Rg. i. 161, 13. 

3 Mahabharata Adi (Chailra-ratha) Parva, clxxiii.— clxxv. pp. 492—500. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 599 

hibiting the completeness of the power of the sun-god ; 
the weeks of the Afijalika weapon of the joined hands 
with their palms placed together with which Arjuna slew 
the year-god Kama, after he had overturned his car with 
the iron arrow, the thunderbolt of this era which destroyed 
all the old-year gods z . The year thus measured was 
one which could be easily manipulated by the priests, who 
had exactly learnt the length of the year, and could always 
add an intercalary month of thirty days every sixth year 
to maintain the average length of three hundred and sixty- 
five days for the year, and the error still left uncorrected 
by this process was repaired in a system of cycles like 
the fifty-two-years cycle of Mexico, in which the intercalary 
days necessary to make the calendar exactly correct were 
added. We shall see in the sequel that in the instructions 
for building the year-altar the Hindu priests actually, ac- 
cording to the Brahmanas, added thirty-five or thirty-six 
intercalary days every sixth year, which was more than 
enough. It was a year in which constant astronomical 
observations could be dispensed with, and was therefore 
one suited to the unastronomical warriors of the North. 

The sun-god who ruled this year, which began, as we have 
seen in discussing the fifty days reckoned for his resurrection 
interval in April— May and May — June, was under this 
change of time-reckoning released from the yoke of the stars 
Gemini, and it was no longer neccessary to begin the year 
when the sun entered that constellation. The last year 
apparently measured by this constellation was that begin- 
ning when the sun was in Gemini at the vernal equinox. 
This year calculation lasted till the sun entered Taurus 
at the vernal equinox, and it is from this epoch, about 4200 
B.C., that modern zodiacal observations have been held to 
date. 

This change in the year-reckoning accompanying the 
victory of the sun-worshippers of the rising sun of day, 

1 Mahabharata Kama Parva, xc. So— 84, xci. 39—49. PP- 359. 365. 3 66 - 



600 History and Chronology 

and the total discomfiture of the votaries of the moon-god 
and those who began their year with the setting sun and 
stars, seems to furnish an explanation of the Bible story 
of the disruption of society consequent on the fall of the 
Tower of Babel. The Tower of the Gate {bab) of God (el) 
is a metaphorical name for those successive measurements 
of annual time which were ruled by the stars Gemini, the 
guardians of the gate of the divine garden, the field of 
heaven circuited by the sun in its annual journey through 
the zodiacal stars which bounded it. 

We have seen that in the reckonings of the zodiacal year 
from the epoch of the year of fifteen months annual time was. 
measured by the entry of the sun into Gemini, a mode of 
reckoning beginning when the sun entered Gemini at the 
winter solstice, between 12,000 and 13,000 B.C. There wasalso 
long before this a persistent deification of the Ashvin twin 
stars, for in the Hindu constellation of Shimshu-mara, the alli- 
gator, which, with its fourteen stars, drove the stars round the 
Pole, the twin stars Gemini were its hands and the divine phy- 
sicians. It was the new deification of the sun-god as a god 
independent of the Pole Star governing the tower of the 
Garden of God, which overthrew this tower, overturned the 
trading governments of the merchant-kings, which united all 
the maritime people in a confederacy of allied states and 
replaced the age of national brotherhood and friendly trade 
rivalry by one of international suspicion and jealousy, in 
which every state feared its neighbours as possible robbers 
who were scheming to appropriate their lands. Hence 
every national tribe used only its own language, and the 
knowledge of the common language of commercial inter- 
course disappeared from the earth. This revolution ap- 
parently dates from the time when the sun entered Taurus at 
the vernal equinox. It was then that the Kirubi or flying 
bulls of Assyria, the Hebrew Cherubim, replaced the twin 
stars, the giants Gog and Magog, as guardians of the Gate 
of God, and as warders of the doors of the temples. It was 
as a consequence of this revolution and the disruption of 



of the My tli- Making Age. 601 

society it caused, that Adam, the red man, who had been 
beguiled by the serpent, ruler of the Garden of Eden, was 
sent forth from the peaceful settlements of the trading age 
to till the waste earth, which was henceforth to be disturbed 
by the wars of conquest and spoliation waged by the united 
tree and sun-worshippers against the money-making progeny 
of the Naga snake. On his departure from the land of the 
mother-tree, the tree of life, the Eastern gates of his former 
home were guarded by the two Cherubim or flying bulls l . 
In this story the triumph of the son of the sun-god and 
the enmity between the old and new beliefs is told in the 
sentence of punishment passed on the serpent. 

F. History as told in the ritual of the building of the brick 
altar of the sun-bird of the twelve- months year. 

It was for the worship of this new sun-god introducing 
Orion's year of twelve months, who rose from the East as the 
sun-bird, that the new brick Ahavanlya altar of libations was 
built in India as the culminating embodiment of the theology 
of the Brahmanas. It was devoted to the celebration of the 
ritual in which living victims were no longer to be offered, 
but the sacrifices were to consist of libations of milk, sour 
milk, barley, running water, and the sap of the Soma plant, 
poured on the altar and consumed by the worshippers as 
sacramental food which incorporated into their frames the 
spirit of the living god. 

This altar was not a brand new creation of a revolutionary 
sect whose object was to entirely obliterate the old faiths, 
but of one which sought to retain the recollection of and 
reverence for the ancient creeds while they substituted 
for their errors, improvements taught by the advance of 
knowledge and experience. It was intended to unite the 
new comers with the ancient population in a bond of national 
union, and this intention is manifested in every stage of 
the ritual of the building ceremonies. 

' (Jen. iii. 22 — 24. 



6o2 History and Chronology 

These begin with the foundation of the altar. The land 
on which it was to be built was ploughed with the 
sacred plough made of the Udumbara fig-tree (Ficus 
glomerata). To this the oxen were yoked with traces of 
the Munja sugar-grass (Saccharum Munjd) of which the Brah- 
mins' year-girdles of three strands are made. In yoking the 
oxen, a Gayatri, or eight-syllabled, and a Tristubh, or eleven- 
syllabled verse, were recited, so that they were dedicated to 
the god of the years of eleven and eight-day weeks. In this 
ploughing, as I have said in Chapter VII. pp. 423, 424, the 
first furrow was ploughed from the South-west to the South- 
east, according to the diagram there drawn ; the second from 
the South-west corner to the North-west, then from North- 
west to North-east, and from North-east to South-east, so as 
to form a square representing the annual course of the sun-bird 
beginning its year at sunset at the winter solstice, and going 
round the four quarters of the heavens to return to its South- 
west home at the next winter solstice. This South-west 
quarter from which the sun starts is called in the Brahmanas 
the Nirriti or unorthodox quarter I . 

After finishing the year-square the cross-lines are ploughed 
to form the eight-rayed star of the fifteen-months year en- 
closed in it. The first line is the North and South line 
going from the middle of the South-west to South-east line, 
to the North-west and North-east line. This is the line 
of the Pole Star and of the year measured by the circuit 
round it of the stars led by the Pleiades and Canopus first 
and the Pleiades and Orion afterwards, when the year was 
changed from the two-seasons year of the Pleiades to Orion's 
year of three seasons. After this the line from South-west 
to North-east, indicating the course of the solstitial year- 
bird round the ploughed square, was drawn. Then the line 
from West to East, indicating the year measured by the 
equinoxes as well as by the solstices, beginning with the 
cycle-year of three years opening at the autumnal equinox, 
the age in which the zodiacal path of the moon and sun 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 2, I, 8 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. p. 320. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 603 

began to be measured. The last line, from North-west 
to South-east, was the line of the white sun-horse of the 
healing fountains and wells, or white bull of the year of 
the eight-days week, who began his year at sunset at the 
summer solstice r . 

The next process is the consecration of the altar site on 
which the sacred sign of the eight-rayed star in the sun- 
square has been ploughed. First a bunch of Kusha grass 
{Poa cynosuroides) was placed in the centre of the star, and 
five libations of ghi or clarified butter are poured on it 
as offerings to the gods of the five-days week and the five 
seasons of the year, and then the priest consecrated the 
ground to the year-god by thirteen sentences, indicating, 
as we are told, the thirteen months of the year. These set 
forth the inner meaning of the five layers of bricks of which 
the altar was built, and declare that it was built to the year- 
god of a year measured by lunar phases and the rising 
sun bringing forth the cows of light. It is said to be the 
altar of the year of the Ashvins, the stars Gemini, and the 
sun-god and sun-horse, of the household-fire and the mother- 
mountain Ida, mother of the cows of light, and of the creat- 
ing-god invoked at it 2 . 

Then twelve jars of water, denoting the twelve months 
of the year which was to be henceforth the national year, 
were poured over the ploughed ground, and three addi- 
tional jars over the whole site of the consecrated area, 
making fifteen jars poured over the whole area, indicating 
the twelve months and three seasons of Orion's year, the 
model of that now instituted. Then seeds of corn and 
healing herbs were sown on the whole consecrated 
from a jar of Udumbara-wood {Fiats glomerata). While 
sowing this seed fifteen Gayatri stanzas were recited of 
Rg. x. 97, attributed to Bhishak Atharvana, the healing fire- 
priest, and called Osadhastuti, the praiser of medicine, twelve 
stanzas dining the sowing of the ploughed area, and three 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 2, 2, 1 — 14; S.B.E., vol. \\i. pp. . 

2 Ibid., vii. 2, 3, 1—9 ; S.D.E., vol. xli. pp. 332—335. 



604 History and Chronology 

during the sowing of that unploughed. This hymn of the 
sun-physician traces the healing virtues of the plants whose 
effects it extols to the holy trees, the Ashvattha (Ficus 
religiosa) and the Parna or Palasha (Butea frondosa), the two 
Soma trees, and ascribes their growth to Brihaspati, the Pole 
Star god. It dedicates the seed sown while reciting them 
to the god of the fifteen-months year. In the thirteenth 
of these stanzas Yakshman {fever) is called on to fly forth 
with the jay *, and we learn from the lives of the Buddhist 
Theris that the blue jay was the sacred bird during the 
age of the year of thirteen months and seven-day weeks. 
Padumavati, the third Theri, was born as one of the seven 
sisters, the seven days of the week, in the palace of Kiki, the 
blue jay, king of Kashi, and in the birth after this she was 
born as a village maiden, who gathered the mother-lotus of 
five hundred seeds, which gave her in her next birth her 
child, the eldest son of the king, called Mahapadumo the 
great lotus, and sons to each of the other four hundred and 
ninety-nine kings' wives 2 . 

It is the leaf of this lotus that was placed in the centre 
of the site of the Ahavanlya altar, but before it was laid 
down sand was scattered over it, and the whole area, 
measuring about forty feet each side, was made level with 
the square mound, the Uttaravedi, measuring seven feet 
on each side, which was its centre. The sand was scattered 
with a six-versed hymn, and these six stanzas, with the four 
bricks placed on the boundary lines and two verses sung 
to make the seed grow, make up, we are told, the twelve 
months of the year, that is of the Brahmins' year divided 
into two seasons of six months each, the Devayana season, 
in which the sun goes North, and the Pitriyana, in which 
it goes South 3. 

The next ceremony is that of the Pravargya, or the 
offering of the large pot and the Upasads. The ritual of 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 2, 4, 1 — 30; S.B. E., vol. xli. pp. 335 — 342. 
" Hewitt, Riding Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. ii., Essay vii., pp. 74 — 77. 
3 Eggeling, Sat. Brah., vii. 3, 1, 1 — 47 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 342 — 355. 



of the Myth- Ma king Age. 605 

the Pravargya is somewhat complicated, but it may shortly 
be described as representing the birth of the twelve-months 
year of the altar from the thirteen-months year and those 
preceding it. The earth for the Pravargya pot is dug with 
a spade made of Udumbara wood, and it is made of five 
materials, the five days of the week : (1) potter's clay, 
(2) clay from ant-hills, (3) clay from earth torn up by the 
year boar, (4) Adari or Soma plants, and (5) goats' milk. 
Three pots, two milking-bowls, and two platters consecrated 
to Rohini, the red cow Aldebaran, are made, and goats' milk 
is poured on these seven representatives of the seven-days 
week. When the materials are ready, the great pot Mahavira 
is placed on the fire, surrounded with thirteen pieces of 
Vikuntula (Flacourtia sapidd) wood, to denote the thirteen 
months of the year, and a gold plate is placed on its top. 
The milk heated in it is that of the cow Rohini, who is 
accompanied by her calf, the young sun-god. She is milked 
into the pot, goats' milk being afterwards mixed with her 
milk. On the fire are burnt successively three bundles of 
fire faggots. During the burning of the first and second the 
Agnldhra or fire-priest stands up, while the last is being 
burnt he sits down like a woman being delivered of a child. 
These three faggots denote the three-years cycle of the year 
of the goat from which the sun-god was born, and before 
the milk is boiled the twelve gods of the new year are 
invoked. The whole ceremony closes with the offering of 
thirteen libations to the thirteen gods of the months, among 
whom Surya, the sun-god, is given the seventh or central 
place. These are offered after the heated milk has been 
drunk by those taking part in the sacrifice 1 . This sacrifice, 
and that of the Upasads to the three seasons of Prajapati's 
(Orion s) year of the arrow, cover in their ritual the whole 
history of the solstitial sun-year 2 . 

After these ceremonies a red-ox skin is placed in Front 

: Eggeling, Sat. Br ah., xiv. 1, 1, I— xiv. ;,. 2, ;' S.B.] .. v.. I. xliv. 

pp. 441—510. 

2 Ibid., iii. 4, 4, 14 — 17 ; S.B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 10S. 



606 History and Chronology 

of the Garhapatya altar with its neck to the East. It is 
consecrated to RohinI, and it is on a similar skin that Hindu 
brides are seated after their marriage I , and before its con- 
summation. The bricks for the first layer are placed on it, 
and sprinkled with a bunch of Kusha grass dipped in ghi 
or clarified butter, and then a white horse is led up to the 
bricks at sun-set 2 . In laying down the first layer of bricks 
a gold plate with twenty-one knobs on it was placed over 
the lotus leaf laid in the centre of the raised altar mound. 
On the plate there was put the gold image of a man lying 
on his back with his head to the East. Over him the first 
five stanzas of Rg. iv. 4 were repeated, calling upon Agni 
to drive away the wicked fiends. Beside the man were laid 
two offering spoons, one of Karshmarya {Gmelina arbored) 
wood of which the enclosing triangle was made on the Soma 
Uttaravedi altar 3, succeeding that in the form of a woman 
with its triangle of Palasha twigs ; the other offering spoon 
was made of Udumbara {Ficus glomeratd) 4. Then a 
Svayam-atrinna, a self-perforated brick made with a hole 
in it, was placed on the man, and there are three of these 
in the altar in the centre of the first, third and fifth layers, 
so as to leave an open passage through the altar. This 
aperture is that for the stalk of the lotus called in the 
Zendavesta the golden tube of Saokanta, the mountain of 
the wet (sak) god. It is through this that the life-giving 
water generated in the lotus growing beneath the mother- 
mountain represented in the altar goes up to its top as the 
mist which descends to the earth in rain and dew 5. This 
self-pierced brick is called Durva, or that born of the firm 

1 Oldenberg, Grihya Sutras, Grihya Sutra of Hiranyakeshin, i. 7, 22, 8 ; 
S.B.E., vol. xxx. p. 193. 
- Eggeling, Sat. BrdA., vii. 3, 2, 1 — 19; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 355 — 362. 

3 Ibid., iii. 4, 1, 16; S. B.E., vol. xxvi. p. 89. 

4 Ibid., vii. 4, 1, 1 — 45; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 362—376. 

5 Ibid., vii. 4, 2, 1 — 9, viii. 1,1,1; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 377—379, xliii. 
pp. 1, note 1, 2; Darmesteter, Zendavesta Khorshed Nyayis, 8; S.B.E., vol. 
xxiii. p. 352, note 3 ; Hewitt, Riding Races of Prehistoric Times, vol, i., Essay 
iii., p. 144. 



of the Myth- Making Age. 607 

{dhruva) Pole Star, and on it is laid a plant of Durva or Dub 
grass {Panicum daetyfon), the creeping grass growing near 
the banks of rivers and watercourses, which always remains 
green during the hottest and driest weather. Next to this 
central brick on its East side a brick called Dvi-yajus, or 
the double-worship, was placed, and then five more bricks 
with different names, representing the generating Agni and 
the spring season, were laid in the same direction leading 
up to the most important brick of all, the eighth brick from 
the centre Polar brick. This is called the Ashadha brick, 
sacred to the month of that name (June — July), which begins 
the year opening with the rains of the summer solstice. 
This eighth centre-brick is the beak of the year-bird of the 
altar *. 

South of this Ashadha brick, representing the beak of the 
sun-bird rising in the North-east at the summer solstice, and 
which rises in the East at the vernal equinox, the live tortoise 
of Kashyapa, the father-god of the Kushikas, was buried with 
its head to the West, and anointed with curds, honey and 
ghi. It was placed between two rows of Avaka {Blyxa 
octandrd) plants, growing like the lotus on marshy lands. 
To the North of the Ashadha brick a pestle and mortar 
of Udumbara wood for the pounding of Soma was buried, 
and on the top of this Northern effigy of the generating Pole 
Star revolving-god was placed the fire-pan (ukha), the making 
of which I have described in Chapter VIII. pp. 495 ff., and 
it, which conveyed the heat which begot life in the sons of 
the rivers and th^ cow, was filled with sand and milk -. 

The heads of the five victims slain at this sacrifice of 
consecration were then placed in the fire-pan. Those of the 
horse and the ram on the North side, the bull's and goat's 
heads on the South, and the man's head in the centre on the 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Brd/i., vii. 4, 2, 10—40; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 379—389; 
also see the plan of the first layer of bricks, Eggeling, Sat. Bra It., S.B.E., 
vol. xliii. p. 17- 

* Ibid., vii. 5, 1, 1—34, vii. I, I, 40— 44 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. pp. 3 S 9~ 399. 

310,311- 



608 History and Chronology 

sanded milk, after putting chips of gold in their mouths, 
nostrils, eyes, and ears. 

Then the building of the altar was proceeded with. Five 
bricks called Ahasya or water-bricks, reminiscences of the 
mother-sea surrounding the mother-mountain, were laid at 
the West, South, and East ends of the cross, inside the circle 
forming the skeleton of the body of the altar bird, and five 
more bricks called Chandrasyah or metrical bricks dedicated 
to the five metres, Gayatri, Tristubh, Jagati, Anushtubh and 
Pankti, representing, as we are told, the five seasons of the 
year, that is of a year beginning when the sun was in the 
North, the place of the metres. The Gayatri represented 
the spring, Tristubh the summer, Jagati, the rainy season, 
Anushtubh the autumn, Pankti the winter x . 

Thus we see that the history of the year is wrapped up 
in the rules for laying this first layer which represents the 
spring season. I shall not give the details of the building 
of each of the other layers with the same minuteness as 
I have described the first, as to do so would be merely to 
repeat for each layer the year history I have given for the 
first, for each layer illustrates a separate section of the suc- 
cessive sequence of years I have depicted in the previous 
chapters of this book. 

Each layer represents a season of the year, the first layer 
the spring, the second summer, the third the rainy season, 
the fourth autumn, the fifth winter. 

The second layer, begun by laying down five Ashvini bricks 
to the five seasons of the year, is especially dedicated to the 
Ashvins, the stars Gemini, and the ritual of the laying of the 
bricks closes with an invocation in fifteen stanzas to the gods 
of the fifteen- months year, beginning with the goat and 
ending with the four-year-old bull 2 . The third layer is by 
the first eleven bricks laid down dedicated to the eleven- 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Bra/i., vii. 5, 2, I — 62, v. 4, 1, 3 — 7 ; S.B.E., vol. xli. 
pp. 401—417, 91. 

2 Ibid., viii. 2, 1, 1 — 9, 16, viii. 2, 4, 1 — 15; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 22 — 27, 
29, 37—39- 



of the Myth-Making Age. 609 

months year, preceding that of fifteen months 1 . In the 
fourth layer of the autumn season the first eighteen bricks 
are dedicated to the eighteen months of the year or the 
eighteen-fold Prajapati, and the latter part of the layer to 
the seventeen-months year of the seventeen-fold Prajapati, 
with a hymn of praise to the thirty-three gods of the year 
of eleven months of thirty-three days -. The fifth or top 
layer of the winter season represents the vault of heaven 
encircling and overarching the altar, and it rests on the 
outside twenty-nine Stomabhaga bricks, called Nakasads or 
bricks of the firmaments, the twenty-nine days of the months 
of Orion's year of the Karanas 3. Inside this fifth layer 
a new Garhapatya hearth is inserted. It is dedicated, like 
the hearth described in Chapter VIII. pp. 559, 560, to the 
year of thirteen months. It is built of eighteen bricks, two 
rows of eight bricks, the first called Chiti, and the second 
placed on it Punashchiti, and on these are placed two 
Ritavya or seasonal bricks, the whole representing the 
eighteen-months year, and on the top are placed two Vis- 
vajyotis or living star bricks, to make up the twenty days 
of the months of the year 4. 

The altar thus built was, as the Brahmana tells us, encircled 
with three hundred and sixty enclosing stones distributed as 
follows round the altars : twenty-one round the Garhapatya 
hearth, seventy-eight round the eight Dhishnya hearths 
appropriated to the priests, and two hundred and sixty-one 
round the Ahavaniya altar. These represent the three 
hundred and sixty nights of the year. The days are repre- 
sented by the three hundred and sixty Yajush-mati bricks 
laid down with formulas, and the hours are represented by 
the ten thousand eight hundred Lokamprini or space-filling 
bricks denoting the Mohurtas of forty-eight minutes each, 
of which there are thirty in a day, and ten thousand eight 

1 Eggeling, Sat. Bra//., viii. 3, 4, 11 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. p. 57. 

2 Ibid., viii. 4, 1, 27, 28, viii. 4, 3, I — 20 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 6S, 71 — 77. 

3 Ibid., viii. 5, 3, 1—8, viii. 6, I, 1, 2 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. pp. 92—94, 
97, note I, 98. 

* Ibid., viii. 6, 3, I, viii. 7, 1, 24; S.U.E., vol. xliii. pp. 117— 131. 

R r 



6io History and Chronology 

hundred in a year of 360 days. But in the verbal instruc- 
tions for laying the bricks on each layer, three hundred and 
ninety-five are ordered to be laid r . The extra thirty-five, 
with an additional day added for the earth used in the altar, 
represent the thirty-six days intercalated every six years 
to make the year-reckoning correspond with actual time. 
But this number or that of thirty-five days for the intercalary 
month would make the six-years cycle too long. It would 
seem that the number thirty-six appears in the calculations 
as a reminiscence of the thirty-six stones which originally, 
as we have seen in Chapter III. p. 105, surrounded in the 
Neolithic Age the sun-circle of three hundred and sixty 
degrees. The official explanation of the intercalary month 
given in the Brahmana is that stated in the commentary on the 
sixty-six stanzas of the Shata-rudriya hymn of the hundred 
(shatd) Rudras, the hundred gods of the oldest Buddhist 
heaven of the Shatum Maharajaka Devaloko, recited on the 
Mahavrata day when the altar was consecrated. This hymn 
contains, according to the Brahmana, three hundred and 
sixty invocations representing the three hundred and sixty 
days of the year, thirty representing the thirty days of each 
of its twelve months, and thirty-five for the intercalary days 
added at the end of every six years 2 . 

The Dhishnya or priests' hearths are built with Lokam- 
prini bricks laid without formulas, thus showing them to 
represent the years before that of the building of the altar 
of the risen sun ; and the rules for their construction, like that 
of the chief altar, reproduce a record of the history of time. 
Thus the Hotri's hearth contains twenty-one bricks, the days 
of the month of the seventeen-months year of libations. 
The hearth of the Brahmanacchamsin or Indra contains 
eleven bricks, the eleven days of the week and months of the 
year of the rain-god of the South-west wind, the Indra who 
brought up the rains of the summer solstice with the help 

1 Eggelmg, Sat. Brak., x. 4, 2, I — 27, x. 4, 3, 8 — 21, ix. 4, 3, 9 ; S.B.E., 
vol. xliii. pp. 349 — 354, note 2, 357 — 360, 244, 245, note 1. 

2 Ibid., ix. 1, 1, 43, 44; S.B.E., vol, xliii. pp. 167, 16S, 150 — 155. 



of the Myth-Making Age. Gil 

of the seven Maruts, the seven stars of the Great Bear, as 
I have shown in Chapter VII. p. 431 *. The Margaliya 
altar of the antelope (mriga) is built of six bricks, the six 
days of the week of the first antelope-year, in which the 
circling- (mrigd) antelope was the sun-bird. The other five 
altars are each made of eight bricks, the eight days of the 
week of the fifteen-months year 2 . 

The reproduction of the ancient time measurements is 
further shown in the use of the ten-days week, which besides 
its meaning of the double hands or of the sacrifice of the 
whole man, also commended itself to these Northern ritualists 
by measuring the year in decimals. The altar was especially 
consecrated to the thirty-six weeks of this year by the recita- 
tion of the Brihat-Saman, sacred to the goddess Brihati of the 
thirty-six syllabled metre, who is said to make the year. 
This was chanted at the consecration of the altar at its 
North-east corner, the rising place of the sun-bird 3. These 
weeks are called in the Rigveda the Dashagva or the ten. 
They are said to be descended from the nine Aiigiras, the 
nine-days week of the three-years cycle 4, and to be their 
best representatives ; also to be, as directors of the course of 
the independent sun, irresistible and uncontrollable 5. They 
help Indra in bringing forth the cows of light and find them 
in the darkness, that is at dawn 6 . These decades were 
therefore the weeks of the rising and not of the setting sun, 
the course of which was measured by the five-day weck<. 

This record of national history told in the ritual and rules 
for building the brick altar of the sun-bird is the crowning 
achievement of the Indian historiographers who drew the 
pictures of the past in symbols, the meaning of which was 
thoroughly understood by the educated people of the age 
in which they lived. These had all been instructed in the 

1 Eggcling, Sat. Brdh., ii. 5, 3, 20; S.R.E., vol. \ii. p. 416. 

2 Ibid., ix. 4, 3, 9, iv. 6, 6, 1 — 5 ; S.B.E., vol. xliii. p. 245. note 1. vwi. 

PP. 433- 434- 

3 Ibid., ix. 1, 2, 37, vi. 4, 2, 10: S.B.E., vol. \liii. p. 1 ~n. vol. \li. p. 220. 

4 Rg. x. 62, 6. s ibid. viii. 12, 2. " [bid. i. 62, iii. 39, 5. 

R r 2 



512 History and Chronology 

national schools in the rules laid down for their interpretation 
by the priests and expounders of the meaning of the my- 
thological stories and ritual. In this age the priests and 
teachers of the people were in India distributed over the 
country as members of the local schools of Brahmanic learn- 
ing, who wrote, as ritualistic hymns, the poems of the Rig- 
veda. These are divided into Mandalas or sections, each 
of which contains the selected poems of the guild named 
in its title. Thus the second Mandala is the work of the 
Bhargavas or sons of Bhrigu, the Median priests, the third 
of the Vishvamitra Kushikas, the fourth of the Gotamas, 
the fifth of the Atriyas, the sixth of the Bharadvajas, the 
seventh of the Vashishthas, and the eighth of the Kansa 
priests of the Yadu Turvasu. The first and tenth Mandalas 
are made up of grouped contributions from separate schools, 
the works of each being placed in its own section, and the 
authors of the hymns of the ninth Mandala are the priests 
of the Soma moon-god, called Soma Pavamana, the god 
of the rain-bringing wind (pavana). The gods invoked in 
the 1,028 hymns preserved in this collection are all year-gods, 
measurers of time, and the intensity of the conservative belief 
in and reverence for the oldest national creating gods, the 
rain and tree-gods, is shown in the very large proportion 
of the hymns addressed to them. Six hundred and eighty- 
one hymns are invocations to the three chief gods of the 
Soma sacrifice. In one hundred and twenty-three of these 
the god invoked is Soma, the creating sap of the mother-tree 
brought by the cloud-bird Su or Khu, called the father 
and begetter of the gods 1 , the lord of thought (manasas- 
pati) 2 and of speech {yacas-pati) 3. Three hundred and fifty- 
four are hymns to Indra, the rain-god, father of life, and 
the especial parent of the sons of the rivers and of the river 
eel ; and two hundred and four to Agni, the god of the house- 
hold and altar fire, and their associate gods. There are also 
thirty-five hymns to the Maruts or wind-bringing goddesses, 

1 Rg. ix. 87, 2. 2 Ibid. ix. 99, 6. 3 ibid. ix. 26, 4, 101, 6. 



of the Myth-Making Age. 6 1 3 

daughters of the tree-ape-god Maroti. Sixty to the Ashvins 
or the stars Gemini, which were, as we have seen, gods 
who take a most prominent place in the history of this 
year, and there are eleven hymns to the Ribhus or makers 
of the seasons. In short the whole ritual of the Indian 
Church as expounded in the Rigveda and the Brahman as 
or ritualistic manuals, is that of the worship of the gods who 
measure time, and it was the successive phases of their wor- 
ship marked in the changing computations of the year which 
formed the epochs of the national chronology. It was these 
records which were preserved by the schools of the prophets 
among the Jews, by the Collegia or Leagues of Dervishes or 
ceremonial priests of Asia Minor, South-western Asia and 
Egypt, who also organised the national rituals in Greece, Italy 
and all other countries where the trading merchants of the 
Indian Ocean and their Mediterranean brethren settled. 

But the memory of the methods of these ancient historians ' 
decayed under the rule of the Northern sun-worshippers, who 
apparently introduced into the countries they conquered 
a long period of confusion and anarchy, similar to that 
which marked the later ages of the Roman empire when 
Roman law and order was trampled under foot by the 
Northern invaders. During this period the priestly his- 
torians were replaced by the genealogical bards, who, in- 
stead of making the personified nation or tribe the heroes 
of their narratives, and telling the history of the nation's 
fortunes, filled their songs with recitals of the deeds of indivi- 
duals. Thus they were the records of personal prowess, 
and in their genealogies all the persons named were con- 
ceived as individuals who were once actually existing, 
ancestors of the kings and warriors whose praises they 
sang. It was also owing to the growth of individualism 
that state astronomy became judicial astrology, employed in 
the making of horoscopes predicting the good or evil for- 
tunes of the persons at whose birth were drawn those pro- 
phetic pictures of the positions then occupied by the stars 
which, according to astrological belief, then dealt out the 



614 History and Chronology 

changes and chances allotted by them to each human life. 
Another cause of the gradual disuse of the methods and 
forgetfulness of the meanings of the ancient histories, was 
the introduction of annals in which the national scribes re- 
corded the events of successive years, characterising each 
year by some remarkable event occurring in it, or by its 
place in the years of the reigns of their kings. These 
annals formed the groundwork of the national chroni- 
cles of the Babylonians, Assyrians and Egyptians, and to 
make their records complete imaginary figures, which some- 
times, like those of the Ten Kings of Babylon, reproduced 
astronomical computations, were assigned to the reigns of 
pre-annalistic rulers, whose names had been symbols in the 
pre-solar histories. This introduction of annalistic chronicles 
separates the age when history was told in symbolic stories 
depicting the institutions, customs and daily lives of the people 
•nvho framed them, from that of modern history, which gives us 
detailed biographies of individuals, kings, warriors and law- 
givers, but which, until recently, almost ignored the social 
movements they directed and the influence they exercised 
over the progress of the people whom they ruled. Under 
these influences the old system of recording the lapse of past 
time by the apparent movements of the stars, sun, and moon 
round the Pole, the changes in the Pole Stars and the month 
by stations of the sun and moon in the zodiacal circle, were 
discarded and almost forgotten in popular ritual. 

The stories of the old gods recording the sequence of 
natural phenomena, the conclusions of primitive science, 
and the history of the past as told in the astronomical suc- 
cession of different methods of reckoning the year, became 
in the new literature narratives of somewhat superhuman 
magnified men and women. They were thus so distorted 
that when their original forms and meanings were forgotten, 
they seemed to describe the gods of our forefathers as mon- 
sters of iniquity. Hence the divine origin of this mythology 
was disbelieved by the philosophical teachers of the new 
spiritual religion based on the study of the mental and moral 



of the Myth-Making Age. 615 

faculties and the standard of duty they taught. And they 
like Plato denounced the ancient myths as blasphemous lies 
invented by the poets, and banished the works in which they 
were used as dramatic plots from the curriculum of their 
ideal schools x . 

It is only by a study of the old rituals, tribal and local 
customs and institutions, religious and historical myths, 
the stages of advance in the knowledge and practice of 
methods of government, agriculture, fruit-growing, phar- 
macy, architecture and mechanical arts, and the develop- 
ment of international trade by land and sea, that we 
can correct these erroneous interpretations of ancient my- 
thology, and reproduce a correct picture of life in the 
ancient world. In doing this we interpret the old national 
histories in the sense in which they were composed by 
the national historiographers, the Pra-shastri or teaching- 
priests of the Hindus, the Asipu or interpreters of the Akka- 
dians, who became the Semitic Rabbi, the Exegetae of the 
Greeks, and the Druid bard-priests of the Celts. These were 
prepared with careful deliberation and enquiry and with 
scrupulous regard to the truths as believed in by their 
authors, and they were handed down to their successors as 
divinely inspired lessons teaching them the methods by which 
national prosperity was secured and the faults by which it 
was lost. We must no longer look on these old mythologies 
as unintelligible records of a time when, as some assert, men 
deliberately cultivated the mythopaeic art of compiling na- 
tional stories as a means of amusement, answering to the most 
frivolous of our modern novels, but as the solemnly recorded 
teachings of ancestors who bequeathed these symbolic his- 
tories to their descendants for their instruction and guidance. 

I have tried in this work to set forth their true meaning as 
far as they record the methods of computing time, and the 
attempts made in the past to find out the real nature of the 
creating powers who ordained natural and moral laws, and 

1 Jowett, Plalo, The Republic, Book ii. vol. iii. pp. 249 — 257. 



* 

6i6 History and Chronology of the Myth- Making Age. 

I only hope that I may have succeeded in stimulating others 
to work in this field of research, in which innumerable dis- 
coveries can yet be made by those who read, interpret and 
edit the numerous works which were once the sources whence 
ancient sages drew their lore, but which now only exist as 
almost neglected manuscripts. It is not only from these 
that additional knowledge is to be gained, but also from the 
buried relics of the ancient and unexplored cities of India, 
of the countries on the shores of the Indian Ocean, and 
between the Mediterranean on the West and the Caspian 
Sea and the Euphrates Valley on the East. There, and also 
in Europe, are many sites which will, when thoroughly 
excavated, furnish harvests of relics no less valuable than 
those which have revealed to us so much of the previously 
obliterated history of Babylonia, Assyria and Egypt. It 
is in India that we shall find in the ruins of such cities 
as those of Pushkala-vasti, or Hastinapore in the Swat valley, 
in Taxila or Takshasila, Kapila-vastu, Mathura and many 
others, authentic records of the rule of the Kushika, Khati 
or Hittite merchant-kings, and probably recover pre-Sanskrit 
tablets in the ancient Hittite syllabic alphabet. This must 
certainly have been used in the country in combination with 
the indigenous methods of preserving and transmitting 
oral records committed to memory by successive genera- 
tions of pupils and teachers. 



APPENDIX A. 



List of the Hindu Nakshatra Stars by Brahma 

Gupta. 



i. Ashvini or Ashvayujau. 

2. Bharani or Apa Bharani. 

3. Krittaka or Krittakas. 

4. RohinI (Aldebaran). 

5. Mrigasirsha, Andhaka, Aryika, 

Invika or Ilvala. 

6. Ardra or Ba.hu. 

7. Punarvasu. 

8. Pushya, Tishya, or Sidhya. 

9. Ashlesha, Asresha, or Ashleshas. 

10. Magha or Maghas. 

11. Purva, Phalguni or Arjuni. 

12. Uttara Phalguni. 

13. Hasta. 

14. Chitra. 

15. Svati or Nishtya. 

16. Visakha or Visakhi. 

17. Anuradha. 

18. Jyeshtha. 

19. Mula or Vichritau, 

20. Purva, Ashadha or Apya. 

21. Uttara, Ashadha or Vaishoa. 

22. Abhijit, meaning now {abhi) con- 

quered {jit). This sign was 
omitted after Vega ceased to 
be the ruling Pole Star, that 
is, after 8000 B.C. 

23. Shravana, Shrona, or Ashvattha. 

24. Shravishtha or Dhanistha 

25. Sata bhisaj. 

26. Purva Bhadrapada, Proshthapada 

or Pratishana, 



j8 Arietis. 

a Muscce. 

23 Tauri (Pleiades). 

a Tauri. 

a Orionis. 

a Orionis (?). 

P Geminorum. 

8 Caneri. 

e Hydras. 

Regulus a Leonis. 

5 Leonis. 

£ Leonis Alsarfa. 

7 or S Corvi. 

Spica a Virginis. 

Arcturus. 

l Librae. 

5 Scorpionis. 

Antares a Scorpionis. 

A Scorpionis. 

S Sagittarii. 

o- Sagittarii. 



Vega a Lyras Al nasr alwaqi. 
a Aquilse, Al nasr altair. 
/3 Delphini. 
a Aquarii. 

a Pegasi. 



Appendix A. 



27. Uttara Bhadrapada. 

28 r . Revati (this after the elision of 
Vega Abhijit) was the 27th 
Nakshatra, and probably was 
the original 27th star before 
Vega became the Pole Star 
when it was first included in 
the list as the ruler of the 
stars. 



7 Pegasi or a Andromedse. 



f Piscium. 



1 J. Burgess, C.I.E., 'Hindu Astronomy, ' J.R.A. S., Oct., 1893, p. 756. 






APPENDIX B. 



The House that Jack built. 



English Version. 

1. This is the Malt that lay 

In the House that Jack built. 

2. This is the Rat 
That ate the Malt 

That lay in the House that Jack 
built. 

3. This is the Cat 
That killed the Rat 
That ate the Malt 

That lay in the House that Jack 
built. 

4. This is the Dog 
That worried the Cat 
That killed the Rat 
That ate the Malt 

That lay in the House that Jack 
built. 

5. This is the Cow with the crum- 

pled horn 
That tossed the Dog 
That worried the Cat 
That killed the Rat 
That ate the Malt 
That lay in the House that Jack 

built. 

6. This is the Maiden all forlorn 
That milked the Cow with the 

crumpled horn 
That tossed the Dog 
That worried the Cat 
That killed the Rat 
That ate the Malt 
That lay in the House that Jack 

built. 



Version of the Talmud. 



1 . A Kid, a Kid, my father bought 
For two pieces of money. 



2. Then came the Cat and ate the 

Kid 
That my father bought 
For two pieces of money. 

3. Then came the Dog and bit the 

Cat 
That ate the Kid 
That my father bought 
For two pieces of money. 

4. Then came the Stick and beat 

the Dog 
That bit the Cat 
That ate the Kid 
That my father bought 
For two pieces of money. 



5. Then came the Fire and burnt 
the Stick 
That beat the Dog 
That bit the Cat 
That ate the Kid 
That my father bought 
For two pieces of money. 



620 



Appendix B. 



This is the Man all tattered and 
torn 

That kissed the Maiden all for- 
lorn 

That milked the Cow with the 
crumpled horn 

That tossed the Dog 

That worried the Cat 

That killed the Rat 

That ate the Malt 

That lay in the House that Jack 
built. 

This is the Priest all shaven and 
shorn 

That married the Man all tat- 
tered and torn 

That kissed the Maiden all for- 
lorn 

That milked the Cow with the 
crumpled horn 

That tossed the Dog 

That worried the Cat 

That killed the Rat 

That ate the Malt 

That lay in the House that Jack 
built. 



Then came the Water 

quenched the Fire 
That burnt the Stick 
That beat the Dog 
That bit the Cat 
That ate the Kid 
That my father bought 
For two pieces of money. 



and 



. Then came the Ox and drank 

the Water 
That quenched the Fire 
That burnt the Stick 
That beat the Dog 
That bit the Cat 
That ate the Kid 
That my father bought 
For two pieces of money. 



9. This is the Cock that crowed in 
the morn 

That waked the Priest all shaven 
and shorn 

That married the Man all tat- 
tered and torn 

That kissed the Maiden all for- 
lorn 

That milked the Cow with the 
crumpled horn 

That tossed the Dog 

That worried the Cat 

That killed the Rat 

That ate the Malt 

That lay in the House that Jack 
built. 



. Then came the Butcher and slew 

the Ox 
That drank the Water 
That quenched the Fire 
That burnt the Stick 
That beat the Dog 
That bit the Cat 
That ate the Kid 
That my father bought 
For two pieces of money. 



Appendix B. 



621 



10. This is the Farmer that sowed 
the corn 

That fed the Cock that crowed 
in the morn 

That waked the Priest all shaven 
and shorn 

That married the Man all tat- 
tered and torn 

That kissed the Maiden all for- 
lorn 

That milked the Cow with the 
crumpled horn 

That tossed the Dog 

That worried the Cat 

That killed the Rat 

That ate the Malt 

That lay in the House that Jack 
built. 



Basque Version. 

1. Akherra hor heldu da 
Arthoaren yatera 
Akherrak arthoa 

Akherra khen ! khen ! khen ! 
Arthoa gurea zen. 

2. Otsoa hor heldu da 
Akherraren yatera 
Otsoak akherra 
Akherrak arthoa 

Akherra khen ! khen ! khen ! 
Arthoa gurea zen. 



9. Then came the Angel of Death 
and killed the Butcher 
That slew the Ox 
That drank the Water 
That quenched the Fire 
That burnt the Stick 
That beat the Dog 
That bit the Cat 
That ate the Kid 
That my father bought 
For two pieces of money. 



10. Then came the Holy One, 
blessed be He, 
And killed the Angel of Death 
That killed the Butcher 
That slew the Ox 
That drank the Water 
That quenched the Fire 
That burnt the Stick 
That beat the Dog 
That bit the Cat 
That ate the Kid 
That my father bought 
For two pieces of money. 

Translation. 

The Goat has come there 
To eat the Corn (maize) 
The Goat (eats) the Corn 
Drive away the Goat 
The Corn was ours. 

The Wolf has come there 
To eat the Goat 
The Wolf (eats) the Goat 
The Goat (eats) the Corn 
Drive away the Goat 
The Corn was ours. 



622 



Appendix B. 



3. Chakurra hor heldu da 
Otsoaren yatera 
Chakurrak otsoa, 
Otsoak akherra 
Akherrak arthoa 

Akherra khen ! khen ! knen ! 
Arthoa gurea zen. 

4. Makhila hor heldu da 
Chakurrareh hiltzera 
Makhilak chakurra 
Chakurrak otsoa 
Otsoak akherra 
Akherrak arthoa 
Akherra khen ! khen ! khen 
Arthoa gurea zen. 

5. Sua hor heldu da 
Makhilaren erret zera 
Suak makhila 
Makhilak chakurra 
Chakurrak otsoa 
Otsoak akherra 
Akherrak arthoa 
Akherra khen ! khen ! khen 
Arthoa gurea zen. 

6. Ura hor heldu da 
Suaren hilt zera 
Urak sua 

Suak makhila 

Makhilak chakurra 

Chakurrak otsoa 

Otsoak akherra 

Akherrak arthoa 

Akherra khen ! khen ! khen 

Arthoa gurea zen. 

7. Idia hor heldu da 
Uraren edatera 
Idiak ura 

Urak sua 
Suak makhila 
Makhilak chakurra 
Chakurrak otsoa 



The Dog has come there 
To eat the Wolf 
The Dog (eats) the Wolf 
The Wolf (eats) the Goat 
The Goat feats) the Corn 
Drive away the Goat 
The Corn was ours. 

The stick has come there 
To kill the Dog 
The Stick (kills) the Dog 
The Dog (kills) the Wolf 
The Wolf (kills) the Goat 
The Goat (eats) the Corn 
Drive away the Goat 
The Corn was ours. 

The Fire has come there 
To burn the Stick 
The Fire (burns) the Stick 
The Stick (kills) the Dog 
The Dog (kills) the Wolf 
The Wolf (kills) the Goat 
The Goat (eats) the Corn 
Drive away the Goat 
The Corn was ours. 

The Water has come there 
To quench the Fire 
The Water (quenches) the Fire 
The Fire (burns) the Stick 
The Stick (kills) the Dog 
The Dog (kills) the Wolf 
The Wolf (kills) the Goat 
The Goat (eats) the Corn 
Drive away the Goat 
The Corn was ours. 

The Ox has come there 

To drink the Water 

The Ox (drinks) the Water 

The Water (quenches) the Fire 

The Fire (burns) the Stick 

The Stick (kills) the Dog 

The Dog (kills) the Wolf 



Appendix B. 



623 



Otsoak akherra 
Akherrak arthoa 
Akherra khen ! khen ! khen 
Arthoa gurea zen. 

. Buchera hor heldu da 
Idiaren hiltzera 
Bucherak idia 
Idiak ura 
Urak sua 
Suak makhela 
Makhelak chakurra 
Chakurrak otsoa 
Otsoak akherra 
Akherrak arthoa 
Akherra khen ! khen ! khen 
Arthoa gurea zen. 

. Herioa hor heldu da 
Bucheraren hiltzera 
Herioak buchera 
Bucherak idia 
Idiak ura 
Urak sua 
Suak makhela 
Makhelak chakurra 
Chakurrak otsoa 
Otsoak akherra 
Akherrak arthoa 
Akherra khen ! khen ! khen 
Arthoa surea zen '. 



The Wolf (kills) the Goat 
The Goat (eats) the Corn 
Drive away the Goat 
The Corn was ours. 

The Butcher has come there 
To kill the Ox 
The Butcher (kills) the Ox 
The Ox (drinks) the Water 
The Water (quenches) the Fire 
The Fire (burns) the Stick 
The Stick (kills) the Dog 
The Dog (kills) the Wolf 
The Wolf (kills) the Goat 
The Goat (eats) the Corn 
Drive away the Goat 
The Corn was ours 

Death has come there 
To kill the Butcher 
Death (kills) the Butcher 
The Butcher (kills) the Ox 
The Ox (drinks) the Water 
The Water (quenches) the Fire 
The Fire (burns) the Stick 
The Stick (kills) the Dog 
The Dog (kills) the Wolf 
The Wolf (kills) the Goat 
The Goat (eats) the Corn 
Drive away the Goat 
The Corn was ours. 



On comparing the stones of this House of the Year-weeks 
in these three versions, we find them arranged in the follow- 
ing order : — 

12345 6 7 

English — Rat Cat Dog Cow Maiden Man Priest 
Talmud — Kid Cat Dog Stick Fire Water Ox 
Basque — Goat Wolf Dog Stick Fire Water Ox 



1 J. Vinson, Folklore du Pays Basque, Cantilenes et P'ormulettes, Les 
Litterarures Populaires, Tome XV., p. 216, Maisonneuve et Cie, Paris. 



624 Appendix B. 

8 9 10 

English — Cock Farmer Malt 

Talmud — Butcher Death God 

Basque — Butcher Death Corn 

Here we have in all three versions the re-risen sun-god 
who was to return to life after being slain by the evolution of 
the nine days of the cycle-week embodied in the conception 
of the Barley-Malt, the maker of the Water of Life, the Corn 
and the Creating gods. This is the revealed form of the 
Being who has implanted in the barley, maize and the 
creating week of time his innermost essence, the life which 
is God-born and re-born from his temporary death. We 
also see in the Basque version the oldest form of the brick 
house, that built by the Pole Star Goat, who precedes the 
Kid star, the constellation Auriga, and the Rat, the Chinese 
Aquarius. Also in this Basque version we find the Wolf 
of Light, the mother of Apollo in Greece, and of the Vedic 
Golden-handed sun Hiranyahasta, born of the blind sexless 
father Rijrashva, the upright horse, the gnomon-stone, and 
his wolf consort I , who is the predecessor of the cat- 
goddess of the Egyptians and the witches of the fully de- 
veloped science of sorcery. We also find in the Basque 
and Talmud versions an epitome of the creed of the fire- 
worshippers, who worshipped the fire-dog, the star Sirius, 
the dog which still attends all Parsi funerals, and who sends 
on earth the seed of fire transmitted through the Stick, the 
fire-drill, which generates fire in the fire-socket, the mother 
of fire, the fifth of these algebraic signs. It was this fire in 
the form of the lightning - charged cloud which produced 
the rain, the water of life drunk by the Ox, the sexless 
parent of the offspring born from the ten months of gesta- 
tion of mother-moon -cow of the cycle-year. From this 
ox and the life-giving water there was generated the change 
of state of the embryo born to the birth of death, followed 

1 Rg. i. 116, 13, 17, 18, 117, 17, 18, 24. 



Appendix B. 625 

by emergence into the new life opening out at the end 
of the ten months of gestation signified by the tenth sign. 

In the English version the creation creed symbolised in 
signs 5 to 9 differs from the spiritualistic belief of the 
fire-worshippers in sexless generation. In this Northern 
creed, the heavenly parents of life are the dog-star Sirius, 
and the moon-cow, from whom are born the parent Twins, 
the Hindu Mithuna, the mother-night and the sun-father 
of day. They, united by the sexless fire-priest, the Hindu 
Agnldhra, the guardian of the fire on the altar of the sun- 
cock, give birth to the ploughing-farmer Rama, who sows 
the corn, whence the sons of the barley and its life-giving 
malt are to be born. 

What is most certainly proved by these three versions, to 
which further research would probably add others, is that 
this ancient school-lesson was disseminated from Asia to 
Europe by the worshippers of the Pole Star Goat, who 
afterwards in Babylon substituted for the Pole Star the 
Kid constellation Auriga as the director of the year. Also 
that the original version was altered into a variant form by 
the believers in the anthropomorphic parent-gods of the 
eleven-months year, who began their year when the sun 
was in the Rat constellation Aquarius, that of the last of the 
ten star-kings of Babylon. These believers in the bisexual 
creating parent-gods were the second race of fire-worshippers, 
described in Chapter V. Section C, whose priests were the 
Hindu Angiras, who offered human sacrifices and dedicated 
their children to the Fire-god. They substituted for the 
sexless fire-drill and socket the Stick and Fire of the 
Talmud and Basque versions, the Moou-cow Maiden and 
Man. These last the Hindu male and female Twins Mithuna 
were the parents of the race born in the Zend Garden of God, 
laid out, planted and tended by Yima the Twin. This was 
the Garden of the cycle-year described in the Zendavesta, the 
gates of which were guarded by the twins Gemini, its door- 
posts, and on the gate was the Tower where the sun-god 
of the three-years cycle was born. It was built of kneaded 

S s 



626 Appendix B. 

clay " with a window self-shining within " (the generating 
moon and sun) " and a door sealed up with the golden ring " 
of the ten months of gestation. In this garden were sown the 
seeds whence were born the offspring of the Sun-Cock, the 
Sun-physician ./Esculapius, to whom cocks were sacred. Their 
produce yielded the best and finest trees and plants, and the 
best bred sheep and oxen, and none of the human children 
of the seed sown by the Twins was to be hump-backed or 
deformed, insane, impotent, or leprous. They were all to be 
men and women endowed with full strength bodily and 
mental, who were to become the parents of the perfect 
human race, the Sons of God of the fifteen-months year *. 

1 Darmesteter, Zendavesta Vendldad Fargard, li. 27, 28. 29, 30, 31 ; S.B.E., 
vol. iv. pp. 17, 18. 






y is 






<r-<-2t- 



APPENDIX C. 



History as told in the variant forms of the 
legend of ino, the mother of melicertes, or 
Melquarth, THE Tvrian Herakles, THE GODDESS 

OF THE KREDEMNON OR ZODIACAL RIBBON. 

INO was the daughter of Kadmus and Harmonia, the 
latter being, as I have shown in the Preface, the goddess- 
mother crowned with the bridal veil of the starry heavens, 
within which Kadmus, r the creator or arranger, carried on 
his creating trade. They both drove the ploughing oxen 
of light, the sun and moon, round the heavens in their 
appointed path through the zodiacal stars. Ino was the 
sister of Semele or Samlah, the vine mother, the birth-tree 
of the creating wine-god Dionysus. Semele died after the 
conception of her son, and the embryo was born from 
the Thigh of his father Zeus, and thus she was the mother 
of the sun-god, son of the seven Thigh stars of the 
Great Bear, the god of the year of fifteen-months and 
eight-day weeks. This god born of the Thigh, whose 
mother died at his conception, is the equivalent of the 
Indian sun-god, the Buddha, whose mother Maya died 
seven days after his birth, and who was brought up by her 
sister Maha Gotami Pajapati, the female form of the star- 
god Prajapati Orion, and the star and moon mother-leader 
of the thirteen Theris, the thirteen months of the year in 
which Rahulo, the young sun-god, son of the Buddha, was 
born in the eleventh month. In the story of Semele the 
part of Maha Gotami Pajapati fell to Ino, for she nursed 
the young Dionysos in the sea-shore cave at Brasiae, the 
womb of the pregnant mother-mountain rising from the 

S s 2 



628 Appendix C. 

sea on the site, as Pausanias tells us, of the Garden of God «. 
She also, like Gotami, was the double of the Star Orion, for 
she was, as the successor of Nephele the cloud, the second 
wife of Athamas, the Ionic Tammas, the Hebrew Tammuz, 
and the Akkadian Dumu-zi Orion. She was originally the 
goddess of the age of human sacrifices, when, according to 
Semite custom, the eldest son was offered. The eldest 
children of Athamas, born of Nephele, the mother-cloud- 
bird of early mythology, were Phrixus, the roasted or 
parched ((fiptr/m) barley grain, and Helle its husk. They 
were to be sacrificed by their father to the Laphystian Zeus, 
whose image was, as Pausanias tells us, set up at Coronea 
next to that of the Itonian Athene. Both images were in 
her temple, where the perpetually burning national fire was 
preserved upon her altar, thus showing her to be the house- 
mother of the nation. The Zeus, her male counterpart, was 
the Cretan god Itanos 2 , and therefore the Akkadian god 
Danu or Tanu 3, the Pole Star god of the world's tree, with 
its roots in the creating-mud (fan) of the South. 

The festival at which this sacrifice, instituted by Athamas, 
was to be offered was that of the Pan-Boeotian New Year's 
Day, that of the autumnal equinox beginning their year. 
At that festival, according to the author of the Minos, the 
eldest sons of the family which claimed descent from 
Athamas used to be sacrificed down to the 4th century B.C. 
This sacrifice is also spoken of by Herodotus vii. 197, and 
according to him it was instigated by Ino 4. But as the 
legends tell us not only of the sacrifice of Phrixus, but also 
of that of Learchus, Ino's son, her share in their institution 
is merely a form of the statement that human sacrifices of 
the eldest son began to be offered when she was first wor- 
shipped as the goddess-mother of life. 

Learchus is said to have been slain by Athamas when 

1 Fraser, Pausanias, iii. 24, 3, vol. i. pp. 173, 174. 
- Ibid., ix. 34, 1—5, vol. i. pp. 486, 487. 

3 Lenormant, La Langne Primitive de la Chaldee, pp. 99, 100. 

4 Frazer, Pausanias, v. pp. 169 172. 



Appendix C. 629 

mad, and this phase of the story shows it to be one which 
told how Athamas became in the course of his avatars a 
mad star-god, who instituted human sacrifices, and who was 
thus the counterpart of the Hindu mad king Kalmashapada, 
he of the spotted or starry feet, the Pole Star god who first 
introduced human sacrifices. The pairs of victims in the 
story, Phrixus and Helle, born of Nephele, and Learchus and 
Melicertes, sons of I no, are the two seasons of the solstitial 
sun whose annual course was ruled by Harmonia, mother 
of Ino. 

These sacrifices of the eldest son mark the beginning 
of the rule of the Northern races, who worshipped the creator 
as the god of generation and looked on blood and not on 
water as the source of life. In accordance with this belief 
the land was each year to be fertilised by the blood of the 
eldest son of its ruler or by some specially selected human 
victim, representing the sun of the old year as dying at his 
year's end and fertilising with his dying blood the land to be 
ruled during the next year by his successor. 

The identification of Athamas with Kalmashapada shows 
him to be in one phase of his history the god of the eleven- 
months year, this being that of the sacrifice of Learchus. 
But in that of Phrixus preceding it, Athamas is the god 
of the cycle-year of three years, beginning, like the Boeotian 
and Jewish year, with the autumnal equinox, when the sun 
was in Aries, the star of the Ram with the Golden Fleece 
which carried off Phrixus and Helle. This, as we have seen 
in Chapter V. p. 207, fixes the date of the legend as between 
14,000 and 15,000 B.C. It was after this that Ino escaped 
from her mad husband with her son Melicertes, the Phoe- 
nician Melquarth, the sun-god, and leaped with him into the 
sea, whence he was saved by the dolphin which landed him 
by the mother-pine-tree of Cybele ; and it was in honour 
of this god that the Isthmian games were held at the winter 
solstice, in which the prize of the victor was a pine wreath. 
The leap into the sea of the goddess-mother of the year-sun 
betokens the descent into the constellation Pisces and the 



630 Appendix C. 

yearly journey to the Southern stars of winter of the god- 
dess who traced the appointed path of the sun through the 
starry heavens. And it is as a star-goddess of the South 
that Ino, mother of the sun born at the winter solstice, 
was depicted in the original form of her legend, when she 
was regarded, as she was in Southern Italy, as the Mater 
Matuta, the mother of life, who was, as we have seen, the 
goddess Bahu ruling the Southern abyss. As the Queen 
of the Stars of the South she fs represented as riding on 
a marine monster called in Latin Pistrix, which is the name 
given by Cicero to the constellation Cetus, the Whale x . 
It is on this monster that she rides in two of her statues 
at Florence and in one at Naples, and it is depicted in 
the Middle Age traditional illustrations of Aratus as a 
dragon, identical in form with that of the Florence and 
Naples statues, with stars on its tail 2 . As the rider on 
the star Whale she is not accompanied by her son, but 
in these illustrations she holds in her hands the two ends 
of a ribbon, called in Greek the Kredemnon, which forms 
an arch over her head ; and that this arch is the zodiacal 
line marking the annual path of the sun through the heavens 
is proved by its appearance on a coin of M. Aurelius, where 
its ends are held by the Twins, the stars Gemini, who 
ushered in the years of fifteen and thirteen months 3. 

Further proof that the Kredemnon indicates the sun's 
path through the stars, which was first thought to be marked 
by the Milky Way, the original Kredemnon, is given in the 
story of Odusseus. He, when he left Ogygia, the island 
of Kalypso, the hiding (tcaXinrTco) goddess, after being 
detained by her for seven years, was arrayed in the panoply 
of the sun-god she gave him, the impenetrable coat of mail, 



1 Cicero, Arati, 152. 

2 Milani, Studi e Materiali di Arclmologia e Numismalica, vol. i., Pantala i. 
pp. 77—80; R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., Aratus, or the Heavenly Display, 398, 
p. 44. 

3 Milani, Studie e Materiali di Archaologia e Numismatica, vol. i., Pantala i. 
Fig. 16, p. 48 



Appendix C. 63 1 

the silver-white mantle or veil (apyixpeov fyapos) worn by 
Kronos, the year girdle, the covering helmet of invisibility 
(fcaXviTTpr)) and the double axe ("ire\e/cvs) of the Carian Zeus, 
the Cretan Itanos J . His voyage from Ogygia to Scheria, 
the land of Alkinoos, the god of the thirteen-months year, 
was one of twenty-one days 2 , the month of the seventeen- 
months year, the temporary year which finally became that 
of thirteen months of twenty-eight days each. On the 
eighteenth day his raft was wrecked by the storm sent 
by Poseidon on his return from the ^Ethiopian realms of 
the Southern sun of winter, and he was saved by Ino or 
Lencothea in the shape of a seagull, who told him to divest 
himself of his solar garments and to trust to the Kredemnon 
she gave him for safety 3. After two days and two nights 
in the water, during which he was supported by the Kre- 
demnon 4^ he reached the Phaeacian coast on the twentieth 
day, and slept, after throwing the Kredemnon into the sea, 
on a bed made of the leaves of the wild (<frv\ir}) and cultured 
(eAa/77) olive 5, before, on the twenty-first day, he was found 
as the sun of the zodiacal chain of stars rising from Pisces, 
to be the sun of the thirteen-months year saved from the 
sea by Nausicaa, the sun-maiden. Ino in this story appears 
in her original form of the cloud-bird bringing the storms 
from the South, the home of the Southern constellation 
of Cetus, the Whale, the storms which were driving the 
sun Northward. It is in her other form of the goddess Scylla 
that we find the classical story of Ino as the goddess of the 
South dwelling in the constellation of the Whale. In this 
phase of her history she appears again in the Odyssey as 
connected with Odusseus in his adventures as a year-god 
before he reached the island of Ogygia, wherein he dwelt 
as the concealed sun -god of the cycle and eleven-months 
year. Ino as Scylla is depicted in the Odyssey as a mon- 
strous whale (ktjtos) barking like a dog, who dwells in a 



1 Homer, Odyssey, v. 228—236. 2 Ibid., v. 34. 3 Ibid., v. 279—376. 
* Ibid., v. 388. 5 Ibid., v. 477. 



632 Appendix C. 

cave in the straits between Italy and Sicily. She is said 
to have twelve feet and six heads, each furnished with three 
rows of teeth, and her name Scylla means the tearer. She 
exacts a toll of six men, whom she devours, from each ship 
that approaches her cave while passing through the Straits *, 
and she took this number of victims from the ship of Odus- 
seus immediately before it reached the land of Trinacria 2 . 
This was the island of the triangle where the three hundred 
and fifty oxen and three hundred and fifty sheep of the sun 
were pastured by the nymphs 3. The comrades of Odusseus, 
after they had consumed the provisions on their ship, killed 
as sacrifices and ate for seven days these oxen, in spite 
of his prohibitions. Consequently when they put to sea 
again the ship was sunk by a storm sent by the gods from 
the West, and Odusseus alone was saved by lashing himself 
to the mast and ship's keel with a rope of ox-hide. This 
saving girdle and gnomon-tree of the sexless gods of the 
cycle-year brought him again to the Straits of Scylla and 
Charybdis, and took him to the rock of the latter goddess, 
on which grew the world's tree of the Kushika and Dardanian 
race, the great wild fig-tree (ipiveos), the tree of Troy, under 
which lay Charybdis. He clung to the branches of this 
tree, and thus saved himself from being swallowed up by her 
when she first drank up the waters of the sea and all they 
contained three times daily and then vomited them up. 
He waited there holding on to the branches like a bat 
(vv/cTepfc) till the mast and ship's keel she had swallowed 
appeared again, and when they came bound together by 
the ox-hide rope he dropped on this raft, and using his 
hands as oars arrived on the tenth day at Ogygia, the 
world's navel, the island of Calypso 4. 

Here we have clearly a year-story of Odusseus as the 
year-god before he became the sun-god of the seventeen and 
thirteen-months year, and the beggar-sun -god who bent the 
bow of Eurytus, and vanquished the suitors who competed 

1 Homer, Odyssey, xii. 84 — 100. - Ibid., xii. 246. 

3 Ibid., xii. 101 — 136. ■» Ibid., 303—452. 



Appendix C. 633 

with him for the rule of the year and the hand of Penelope, 
who was first the goddess Rohini, queen of the spinning 
Pleiades, and afterwards the Star Vega, the weaving-sister 
who wove the web {ir^vrj) of Time. The present episode 
was subsequent to that in which he became the year-god 
of the right thigh, whose left had been disabled by the gash 
of the tooth of the year-boar. 

This story of the year-god saved from death by the world's 
fig-tree which he grasped, is one evidently concocted, not in 
the lands and islands of the tideless Mediterranean, but 
in those washed by the ocean where the tide ebbs and flows 
daily like the water swallowed by Charybdis and by the 
Hindu Agastya, the controller of the tides, the star Canopus. 

The story of the year-god saved from death by clinging 
to the branches of the world's tree appears in its Indian form 
in that of Bhujyu, the Tugra, the son of the Tugras or Tir- 
gartas, the men of the three {tri) pits (garta), who worshipped 
the Takka trident as the Yupa or sacrificial stake. This was 
the weapon of Poseidon, who raised the storm in which 
Odusseus was saved by Ino. Bhujyu, whose name means 
either he who bends, the god of the circle of time or the 
enjoyer or devourer, is, like Odusseus, a time-god of the 
theology of the year of three seasons and the cycle-year. 
His story in the Veda is told in several fragments which 
have to be pieced together. It tells how he was three days 
and nights in the ocean, and was being carried away by the 
floods, its swiftly moving tides, when he saved himself by 
clinging to a tree standing, that of Charybdis, in the midst 
of the roaring flood of the rushing waters she swallowed. 
He was taken thence by the circling-bird (Mriga, Zend 
MeregJi, Hindi MnrgJii), the year-bird who takes the sun 
yearly round the Pole. It was sent to his aid by the 
Ashvins, who were first the Twins Day and Night (Ushasa- 
nakta), and afterwards the stars Gemini. This bird bore 
him aloft to heaven as the year-god, and becomes in the 
variant forms of the story, one ship with a hundred oars, 
four ships, three waggons with six horses having a hundred 



634 Appendix C. 

feet, also winged brown horses, and the special team of the 
Ashvins, which was, as we have seen, the asses which drew 
their year's car *. 

We have seen that the Twins Day and Night, and the 
stars Gemini, play a most important part in astronomical 
time reckonings from the days of the cycle-year downwards, 
and doubtless, if we had the myth of Bhujyu before us in the 
same detail as that in which the transformations of Odusseus, 
the year-god, are told, we should find him spoken of as the 
year-god or bird drawn by the hundred-oared ship, the con- 
stellation Argo, called Satavaesa or that of the hundred 
creators or rowers, by the four year-ships or four sections 
of the cycle-year, and by the asses and horses of the sun- 
god's chariot, where he would be the counterpart of the bird 
Garuda, sitting at the back of that of Krishna. We have 
no indications in the story of Bhujyu to show us the exact 
date when he first became the year sun-god, who sank at his ' 
setting into the roaring waters of the Southern sky ocean, 
those of the constellation Pisces. But in that section of the 
story of Odusseus, which is a variant of that of Bhujyu, we 
ought to be able by the numbers of the oxen and sheep 
of the sun to locate the age in the history of annual time in 
which it must be placed. 

The three hundred and fifty oxen, and the like number 
of sheep, making up seven hundred in all, recall the seven 
hundred and twenty days and nights into which the 360 
days of the year-sun-calf born of the moon-cow are divided 
in the cosmological hymn of the Rigveda i. 164, 11. Thus 
the story seems to be one of a year-measurement, like that 
of the Hindu Karanas, in which there were twelve months 
of twenty-nine days each, making up a year of 348 days, 
or twelve days short of the 360 days of the Vedic year. 
These twelve days were, as we have seen, added to the year 
by the twelve days' rest, revel or sleep, of the sun-god, who 
awoke or rose from the dead to be the sun-god of the new 

* Rg. i. 182, 5—7, i. 116, 3—6, i. 117, 14) i- Il8 > 6 > i- ll 9> 4- 



Appendix C. 635 

year born at the winter solstice. The ten days of the year 
of Odusseus still left uncompleted at the end of the time 
when he quitted the fields of the 350 slain day oxen, appear 
to be those which he passed in reaching the world's tree 
and the island of Calypso, to which he came on the tenth 
day 1 . 

Thus the story seems to be a variant of that of the year 
of the sun-deer, and in this Odusseus' year the Northern 
decimal ten was the unit instead of the Southern duodecimal 
of the deer year. We have already seen that the division 
of the sun-circle of 360 degrees into tenths was a very ancient 
custom observed by the Neolithic erectors of the sun-circles 
of Solwaster in Belgium, and the ancient custom was recalled 
again to life by the Athenians and Egyptians, who divided 
their year into thirty-six decades of ten days each. If these 
decades were grouped into months of thirty-six days each 
we should have a reproduction of the old Romulean ten- 
months year of the Roman kings 2 . This is the same year 
as that called in the Mahabharata the year of the ten 
daughters of Daksha, named Kirti, Lakshmi, Dhriti, Medha, 
Pushti, Cradha, Kria, Buddhi, Lajja, and Mati3. They are 
the wives of Dharma, the god of law and order, the months 
of the year of the showing-god Daksha, denoting his ten 
fingers and the ten -di visions of his sun-circle, beginning with 
the October — November month of the Kirats or Pleiades, and 
ordered by the boundary-god Lakshman, who marked the 
course of the year of Rama. 

This year, when adapted to the Northern custom of leaving 
a number of days at the end of the year which were not 
included in the monthly measurement, would be one of ten 
months each of thirty-five days divided into seven five-day 
weeks, followed by the two five-day weeks during which 
Odusseus went to the island of Kalypso. These answer to 

1 Homer, Odyssey, xii. 447. 

2 See for the Romulean Year, Hewitt, ' Early History of Northern India,' 
Part V. f.R.A.S., 1890, pp. 569, 570. 

3 Mahabharata Atli {Sambhava) Parva, cxvi. p. 189. 



6 36 Appendix C. 

the Vedic days of rest of the sun-god after he had reached 
the house of Agohya, the Pole Star, at the top of the world's 
tree. This was the resting-place of the Ribhus, the makers 
of the seasons *, where they lay twelve days among its 
branches, where Zikum and Europa, the Akkadian and 
Western mothers, dwelt under the starry veil which covered 
it, as explained in the Preface, p. xxi. 

These ten days made up the three hundred and sixty days, 
and the division of the year into fives enabled the year 
regulators to add an extra five-days week to make up the 
365 days of the year, an addition which was made in very 
early times by the Egyptians, as we learn from the story 
of the killing of Osiris by Set and his seventy-two assistants, 
that is by the seventy-three weeks of the year. 

This reckoning of seventy instead of seventy-two five-day 
weeks as the number completing the year of months enables 
us to account for the frequent substitution of seventy for 
seventy-two as the number of sacred messengers, such as the 
seventy ruling elders of Israel appointed by Moses 2 , who, as 
in the story of Set, are increased, in Exodus xxiv., to seventy- 
three by the addition of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu. Similarly 
the seventy Budela or assistants under-propping the hierarchy 
of Dervishes, as explained in the Preface, p. xlvi., are increased 
to seventy-three by the addition of the three head Dervishes, 
the Kutb, or Pole Star Pillar, and his two Umena or faithful 
ones. 

This year of ten months of thirty-six days each was ap- 
parently that of the Ten Star-kings of Babylon, for the 
432,000 years of their reign are the number of seconds in 
the circle of 360 degrees ; and this number is also that of 
the Hindu Kali-Yuga on which the whole of their calendar 
is based. It began when the sun was in Hamal a Arietis, 
the star of the first king Alorus, the king of the Akkadian 
sheep (lu), the sheep of the sun of Odusseus' year, and the 
last star of the ten, the star of Xisuthrus, the king of the 

1 Rg. iv. 33, 12. - Numbers xi. 16. 



Appendix C. 637 

Flood, is Skat in Aquarius T . This is the first star of the 
thirty stars marking the track of the moon through the first 
three months of the Akkadian year, beginning in Kislev 
(November — December), with the entry of the moon into 
the star Skat in Aquarius. Thence it, during the months 
of Kislev, Tebet and Sebet, from November — December 
to January — February, took, according to the words of the 
Akkadian tablet describing the year, " the road of the sun," 
and this star is also said to be " a gate to be begun," in 
short, the gate through which the young sun-god, nursed 
by the moon, entered the year 2 . 

Thus according to the combined history of the year be- 
ginning with the passage of the moon through the thirty 
stars, which it enters from the star Skat in Aquarius, in 
November — December, and the year of ten months of the 
ten kings, beginning when the sun passed from Skat in 
Aquarius to Aries in November — December, the year was 
one which began about 10,000 B.C., when the sun entered 
Aries in November —December. This entry into Aries fol- 
lowed the flood of Marchesvan (October — November), the 
month of the Flood of Noah, the tenth of the patriarchal 
kings of Genesis. This began on the seventeenth day of 
Marchesvan in the six hundredth year of Noah, when he 
had completed his Ner or Babylonian epoch of 600 years 3. 
It was at the close of the Flood season, when the sun entered 
Aries in November — December, that the dove sent forth 
after the disappearance of the primaeval mother-bird, the 
raven, announced the birth of the new earth of the olive-tree 
mother Athene by returning with the olive-leaf in its beak 4. 
This flood, which thus ushered in the year of the Itonian 
goddess of the tree of which the year-bed of Odusseus, 
described in Chapter IV. p. 144, was made, appears to be 

1 Hewitt, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, vol. i., Essay iv. , pp. 383, 

384, 385. 

2 R. Brown, jun., F.S.A., 'Tablet of the Thirty Stars.' Proceedings of the 
Society of Biblical Archceology, January, 1S90. 

3 Gen. vi. 11. * Ibid. viii. 11. 



638 Appendix C. 

the same traditional catastrophe as that in which Bhujyu 
and Odusseus were all but overwhelmed, when Bhujyu was 
saved by the Ashvin stars Gemini, who sent him a year-car 
and brought him forth as the risen sun-god who entered 
Gemini in January — February, after being in Aries in No- 
vember — December. Similarly Odusseus was finally saved 
from the Flood by Ino in the form of a seagull, the bird 
which appears in the Bhujyu legend as the Mriga, or circling 
year-bird. 

The year thus introduced, about 10,000 B.C., began when 
Vega, the Egyptian goddess Maat, meaning The Truth, 
was the Pole Star, and this star sacred to the goddess of 
law and order, was depicted on the jewel-locket worn round 
the neck of the Egyptian judges I , answering to the breast- 
plate of the Jewish High-priest. It appeared in Indian 
historical mythology as the star of the god Dharma, the god 
of right and justice (dkarm), and the husband of the ten 
daughters of Daksha, the ten months of the year which I 
have just sketched. This was apparently the year of Ino, 
and the original form of the thirteen-months year of the 
thirteen Buddhist Theris, led by Maha Gotami Pajapati, the 
female form of Prajapati or Orion, the husband of Ino, who 
was the sister of Semele, mother of Dionysos, son of the 
Thigh, and the counterpart, as we have seen, of Maga, the 
mother of the Buddha, the sun-physician. 

Ino, as the goddess-mother of the year, the year bird who 
saved Bhujyu and rescued Odusseus with the zodiacal Kre- 
demnon, was also the goddess Scylla, represented in the 
ancient statues I have named as riding on the marine monster 
or Pistrix, which depicted in primitive pictorial astronomy the 
Southern constellation Cetis. It is in the form of the goddess 
with the body of the whale that she appears in the yEneid, 
where Scylla is described as having a human face, woman's 
breasts, the body of a whale {ftisfrix), the tail of a dolphin, 
the dolphin mother of Melicertes or Melquarth, and the womb 

1 H. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der Alien sEgypter, pp. 477, 478. 



Appendix C. 639 

of a wolf 1 , the wolf-mother of the sun-god. But the most 
significant appearance of the goddess Scylla and her com- 
panion whale Pistrix in the ^neid is that given in the 
accounts of the race between the Trojan ships. The story 
of the ^neid is, like those of the Odyssey and Iliad, founded 
on old historical legends, and among these latter, as I have 
shown in Chapter VIII. Section C, the chariot-race won 
by Diomedes at the burial of Patroclus tells a most remark- 
able history of changes in the year's reckoning. The year 
horses which won this race were, as we have there seen, two 
of those horses of the sun taken by Anchises, the father of 
^Eneas, when he substituted six mares for the six horses he 
stole 2 , and thus made a year which replaced that of the 
twelve horses of the sun of Orion's year by one measured 
by six paired months, six male and six female, with the 
thirteenth month described in Rg. i. 164, 15, in the centre. 
The year games described in the ^Eneid, which correspond 
to those at the burial of the year-god Patroclus, whom we 
have seen in Chapter VII. Section H. p. 490, to be a counter- 
part of the sun-physician, are those which took place on the 
ninth and last day of the festival held to inaugurate the 
year of Anchises, the founder of this )'ear reckoning. It was 
held at the port in Sicily of Acestes, son of the river Crimisus, 
who was clothed in the skin of a she-bear 3. This was the first 
port touched at by the Trojan fleet after it had sailed north- 
ward from Africa, leaving the sun-maiden Dido burning on 
her funeral pyre as the dead-year-goddess, and it was here 
that the New Year was ushered in, measured by the sun-god of 
the sons of the rivers and the Great Bear mother constellation, 
a year beginning with a nine-days festival, reproducing the 
nine-days week of the cycle-year. The race which, like the 
chariot-race of Diomedes, began the year games held on this 
ninth day was that of the four picked ships of the Trojan 
fleet. These, which were all emblems of successive vear 



1 Virgil, AL7ieid, iii. 424 — 428. " Homer, Iliad, v. 26S— 270 

3 Virgil, ALncid, v. 1 — 65. 



640 Appendix C. 

reckonings, were (1) The Chimaera, the ship of the cycle- 
year, the monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, 
and the tail of a dragon, slain by Bellerophon or Baal 
Raphon, the sun-physician of the eleven-months year ; (2) 
The Centaur, the Vedic Dadhiank, with the head of a horse 
and the body of a man, who was in Greece Chiron the 
Centaur, with the horse's body and man's head, and thus 
both these were personations of the mythology of the eleven- 
months year ; (3) Pistrix the whale ; and (4) Scylla its head- 
piece, to which the honours of the race were to fall, and they 
represented the thirteen-months year of Ino and GotamI 
Pajapati. 

The race, like the Trojan chariot contest, was run on 
a course representing that of the sun round the zodiac. 
The solstitial turning-point, which was in the race at Troy 
the pine or fig-tree of Ilos, was a rock rising from the sea 
at some distance from the shore. In rounding this rock 
the Centaur struck on it, broke its oars and was disabled, 
while the Pistrix passed her and almost caught the Scylla, 
which won the race, being brought to the winning goal by 
the hand of Portunus, the god who, as we shall now see, was 
the son of Ino, who secured the victory of the year-reckoning 
of his mother, the goddess riding on the back of the whale 
constellation of the South, the ruler of the mid-month of the 
thirteen which measured the year r . 

The god Portunus who gained the race for his mother 
as Athene by confounding the machinations of Apollo 
Smintheus, the mouse-god, gained the Trojan chariot-race 
for Diomedes, was originally the god Melicertes or Mel- 
quarth, the sun-master (malik) of the city {kartJi), who was 
awoke from his twelve days' sleep at the close of his year 
by the quails who arrived at the winter solstice. He was 
changed into the god Palaimon or Baal Yam, meaning the 
god of the seas 2 , by the descent of his mother into the 
Southern Ocean, whence the sun rose from the constellation 

1 Virgil, sEneid, iv. 104 — 243. 

2 Berard, Origine des Cultes Arcadiens, p. 234. 



Appendix C. 641 

Pisces to tread the circle of the zodiacal stars. It was as 
the god of the seas born of the dolphin or womb (8e\(f)vs) 
mother, the dolphin Apollo, that he became the Etruscan 
god Portunus, god of the ports depicted as holding the keys 
of the gates of time. His festival was held at Rome on the 
17th of August, almost simultaneously with that of his 
counterpart the god Vertumnus, ruling the turning (verto) 
of the year held on the Aventine or the 13th of August 1 . 
He was the tutelary god of the Etruscan seaport Populonia 
or Papluna, the city of Papluna or Fufluns, the Etruscan 
Dionysos, who was identical with the Greek Dionysos, the 
Roman and Etruscan god Vertumnus, and the god Janus 
or Dianus with the double-axe of the Carian Zeus, and 
all were later male forms of the Etruscan mother Voltumna, 
at whose shrine the annual national councils of Etruria were 
held 2 . 

This male god was the sun-god originally born from the 
mother-tree growing in the Southern mud, and now reborn 
from the whale or dolphin-mother, the goddess of the 
Southern Ocean, whose son started on his annual journey 
from the constellation Pisces. His year coincided with that 
of Portunus, and their mid-year festival was in August,, 
answering to that of Lug and Tailltiu, the flower-goddess, 
to whom the month July — August was dedicated. Hence 
it began, like that of Lug in February — March, with the 
entry of the sun into Gemini in that month between 8000 
and 9000 B.C., and it is apparently this year which is sym- 
bolised in the installation of Odusseus as the year-god 
rising from the sea by the help of the Kredemnon. 

As the outcome of this analysis of these connected myths 
we see that the drownings of Bhujyu and Odusseus, the god 
of the year of the sun-horse with the impenetrable armour, 
before they rose from the sea as sun-gods pursuing their 

1 Fowler, The Roman Festivals, pp. 201, 202, 203. 

2 Milani, Museo Topografico dell' Etruria, pp. 31, 43 — 46, 143 — 145, notes 
39, 41, 47 ; Deecke, Etruria, Encyc. Brit., Ninth Edition, vol. viii. 634 — 636; 
Leland, Etrtisean Roman Remains, p. 70. 

T t 



642 Appendix C. 

paths through the stars, the myth stories of Ino, Melicertes, 
Palaimon and Portunus, and the victory of the year-ships 
of Ino as Scylla, the year-mother riding on the whale, which 
are told' in the dramatic narratives I have quoted, were 
intended by their original authors to tell of the contest 
lasting for thousands of years between the year-gods of 
the Pole Star and lunar solar-age and the sun-god of the 
solar epoch. This contest ended in the final victory of 
the sun-god of the seventeen and thirteen-months year. 



INDEX. 



Aaron, the holy ark of the law, the 
chest or breast of God, 29, 123, 297, 
449. See Chista 

Abantes, their tonsure, 338 

Abhimanyu, son of Arjuna and Su- 
bhadra, who became the moon-god, 
191,481,483, 529 

Abram, the father [ab) Ram, the 
Indian year-god Rama, the Assyrian 
Ram-anu, the Ram or Rimmon of 
Syria, 51, 52, 252, 411, 523, 583, 

593 

Abyssinia, 53 

Achai; sons of the snake Echis, the 
Sanskrit Ahi, 32, 57 

Achan, 152 

Achilles, the little snake (ex' s )> the 
sun-god, son of Thetis, the mud 
{thith) mother of the South, and 
Peleus, the northern Polar Potter 
of the potter's clay (wqXbs), 28, 143, 

3 2 9, 33^. 339. 492, 507, 5°S, 5°9, 
578 
Adam, the father of the red race, 215, 

221, 349 

Adhvaryu, the leader of the ceremonial 
priests in the Hindu ritual, 220, 226, 
227, 232, 501, 503, 504, 543 

Adtti, she who is without (a) a second 
{did). The primaeval mother, sister 
of Daksha. the god of the showing 
hand, whose five fingers indicate the 
live-days week, and daughter of 
Uttana-pada, she with the out- 
stretched legs, the canopy of heaven 
with its two productive thighs, the 
two Bear constellations, 425, 502, 

_ 516. See Uttana-pada 

Aditya, the six days of the creating- 
week of the age of the belief in pair- 
gods, that of the Kabiri, 65, 186. 
See Kabiri, Tri-kadru-ka 

Admetus, the god of the unsubdued 
(a5a,u7jTos) nether world, 507 

Adonis, the Phoenician Adon, the 
Master, the son of the Cypress-tree, 
the Phoenician equivalent of the 
Hebrew Tanunuz, the Akkadian 
Dumu-zi, the son (dumit) of life, the 
year-star Orion, 29, 59, 60. 204, 257 

T t 



Adriku, the rock-mother, the sun-falcon 
mother of the eel-parent gods of the 
Hindu royal races, 191, 59 2 

sEneas, 146, 148, 152, 508 

ALsculapius, the sun-physician, marked 
as a Hindu god by his serpent form, 
the snakes and cocks sacred to him, 
163, 255, 305, 306, 626 

Aeshma-deva Asmodens, the stone 
{ashman) god of the worship of the 
horned gnomon stone pillar, 412, 
421 

^Ethiopians, collectors of incense, At- 
jub, 52, 252, 257 

Aga-viedes, the Pole-star goat (Aja) 
to whom black rams were offered, 
god of the age of the eleven-months 
year, one of the two thieves who 
robbed the Treasury of the heaven 
of the inspired bees. See Bee, 368, 

37>, 372 
Agastya, the singer {go), the leader of 

the harmony of the spheres, the 

raven and ape-star Canopus in Argo, 

23. 40, 63, 108, 228, 286 
Agni, the Lettic-god Ogan, the fire- 
god of Hindu ritual, 42, 186, 216, 

299, 400, 502, 504, 525, 591, 606, 

607 
Agni-chayana, altar and ceremony of 

the heaping up {chayana) of Agni in 

the building of the final brick altar, 

67, 68, 103, 562 
Agnidhra, the unsexed priest of Agni, 

1S0, 226, 232, 605, 625 
Agni Jdtavedas, which knows {vedas) 

the secrets of birth {Jat), the central 

fire on the altar, 228 
Agni-knlas, the men of the fire-family, 

the Saisa-Nagas, or sons of the son 

{sisn) of the Nagas, 590 
. Ignishvallah, the Fathers of the 

Bronze Age who burnt their dead, 

226, 363 
Agni Vaishvanara, the household 

fire of the yellow Vaishya, or sons 

of the village, 186, 591. See Vas- 

tospati 
Agohya, she who cannot be concealed 

the Pole Star, 101 



644 



Index. 



Agraeratha, he of the foremost {agra) 
chariot (ratha), the star Canopus, 

_i73> 174 

Agrahdyani, Agrdhan (November — 
December), 332, 501, 564, 565. See 
Marga-sirsha 

Agur-nalk, 353, 354 

Agurwalas, 353, 354, 355 

Ahalya, the sun hen-wife of Gautuma 
and Indra, 146, 163, 255, 313, 314, 

546, 575 
Ahavamya, square altar of libations, 

103, 496, 542, 560, 562, 601, 604, 

608 
AM, the eel or holy snake, 215. Ahi- 

ksheli'a, iheland oftheAhis, 15, 106, 

196, 204 
Ahi Budhnya, the snake of the 

depths, the Greek Python, 430, 431. 

See Python. 
Ahura or Asura Mazda, the breath 

(ahu or asu) of knowledge, the su- 
preme Zend-god, 124, 126, 155, 170, 

256 
AMU, Welsh, Ellyl, the dwarf, 489 
Amos, 1 16 — 118, 119, 120 
Aja-eka-pdd, the one-footed goat, the 

Pole Star god, 142 
Aja-midha, the fighting (midha) goat 

(«», 597 
Ajas, sons of the goat, 592, 594, 

596 

Akastos, 340, 492, 515 
Akkadians, 24, 26, 51, 520, 569 
Akkhadi or Akktuj, Gond and North 

Indian ploughing festival of the 

axle (akkha), 64, 164, 324 
Akmon, the stone (as/ima?i) anvil, the 

father of fire and of Eurytos, the 

heavenly archer, the rainbow-god, 

and giver of rain, 149. See Eurytus 
Akra, the sacred dancing-ground under 

the shade of the Munda-Dravidian 

Sarna, or central grove of the village, 

14, 16, 449, 450 
Akropolis, the central hill of the city, 

57, 383, 384, 398 
Akshauhini, or axle (aksha), divisions 

of the year of the Kauravyas and 

Pandavas, 309, 597 
Aldebardn, the Queen Star leading the 

Pleiades, 23, 60, 84, 89, 93, 162, 

210, 228, 243, 399, 411, 427, 432, 

484, 565, 605 
Algonquin Indians, 550 
All Baba and the Forty Thieves, 368, 

37o 
Alkinoos, king of Phseacia, 512, 513 
Allot, Alilat, Akkadian and Arabian 



goddess of the South or nether 
world, 53, 434. See Bahu 
Alligator or Crocodile-god and Con- 
stellation, 85, 100, 156, 221, 329, 

378, 379, 53i 

Almond-tree, sacred tree of the Jews, 
29, 123, 405, 449, 526, 528. See Luz 

Altar, and its forms, beginning with 
the earth altar in the form of a 
woman, 67, 68, 103, 164, 184, 227, 
228, 245, 248, 269, 270, 301, 421, 
422,423,545,601 — 611. See Aha- 
vamya, Dakshina, Garhapatya, 
Linga, and Vedi altars 

Am, the mother mango-tree, 167 

Amazons, the Greek and Asiatic de- 
scendants of the Indian Matriarchal 
races, 12, 57, 120, 133 

Amlni, the chief star in the Pleiades, 
one of the three Indian star-mothers, 

96,97 
Ambalika, the Great Bear mother, sister 

of Amba, 96, 98, 195, 362 
Ambarvalia, boundary processions, 

542 
Ambika, the Pole Star mother in Cyg- 

nus, sister of Amba, 96, 97, 195, 

309, 362 
Amnion, Anion, the supporter, 253, 

317 
Am-nor, the North mother-land of the 

Todas, 121 
Am-rita, the Water of Life, 155 
Andhitd Ardvi Surd Andhitd, the pure, 

holy, undefiled mother of life, the 

Greek Anaitis, the river Euphrates, 

125, 214, 235, 273 
Anchises, husband of Aphrodite, and 

stealer of the sun-horses of the year, 

146, 147, 148, 507 
Andromeda, Phoenician Adamath, the 

red-earth mother, 209, 305 
Andvari, the wary dwarf guardian ot 

treasure, 357 
Anga, the Volcanic land of the Angiras, 

199, 212, 353, 359, 519 
Angiras, priests of the burnt offerings 

which succeeded those eaten raw, 

210, 212, 222, 224, 296, 297, 353, 

5*9 

Am, the Egyptian guide to the realms 
of the dead, the recorder of the 
Papyrus of Ani, 150, 530, 531, 533, 

534 
Aujalika, weapon of the folded hands, 

meaning of, 213, 519 
Anna, Phoenician and Roman goddess, 

the Akkadian Ami, 240, 241, 410, 

411, 418 



Index. 



645 



Annamese, 43, 90 

Antares a Scorpionis, 147, 417 
intelope, the god of the Kushikas, 
descendant of the deer-sun-god of 
Northern Europe, and father-god of 
the Indian Brahmins, 7, 9, 98, 135, 
I42ff, 147, 307, 496, 567, 568, 569, 
584. See Krishna, Deer-sun-god 

Anthesteria, year festival of the Recall 
of the Dead, 399 

Anthony, St. , the father of the house- 
hold fire, 151, 549, 551, 552 

Antilochus, 508, 509, 510 

Anubis, the Jackal, 534 

Anus, sons of Sharmishtha, the Kushi- 
ka mother Banyan-tree, 215, 242, 
270, 592, 594, 596 

Apaturia festival, 58 

Ape, female and.male parent-god, xvii., 

35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44, 74—76, 
no, 143, 151, 164, 199, 264, 313, 
376 

Aphrodite, 56, 135, 148, 189, 231 

Apollo, Aplu, Ablu, or Abel, the son, 
256 

Apollo, the dolphin-god, 177 

A-bollo Lycceus, the wolf-god of the 
yellow race, born on the Xanthus, the 
yellow river, son of Lato, the tree 
trunk, 247, 345, 391 

Apollo Paia.11, the healer, the sun- 
physician, 315, 430, 517, 569 _ 

Apollo S/nintheus,the TSlonse(S//iiulhos) 
god of Troy, 14S, 265, 380, 404, 416, 

491, 5io 

Apple of the Hesperides, 384, 571 

Apr!, ten hymns of the Rigveda to the 
gods of the eleven, twelve, and thir- 
teen months of the year, recited at 
the animal sacrifices, 49, 299, 301, 
319, 494, 503, 562 

Apsara, water \ap) goddesses, 279, 517 

Aptya, water gods, 226 

Aquarius, 332, 414, 415, 624, 625. 
See Rat 

Aquitaine, land of the goat (Aker), 
141 

Arabia, 20, 52 — 54, 56, 203, 234 

Arabian Nights, Historical value of, 
582, 583, 584 

Arabs, 223 

Ara Maxima, 164, 442, 443, 445 

Ararat, mother mountain of the fire- 
worshippers, 25, 137, 153, 214 

Araxes, or Kur, river-mother of the 
fire- worshipping Kurds, Kurus,Kaur- 
avya, 25, 121, 279 

Arbuda, 364, 365 

Arcadians, 1 1 



Ar-chal, the Phoenician Herakles, 102, 
145, 164, 286, 397, 454, 540 

Argei, 239, 540, 541 

Argo, the mother constellation of the 
raven and the ape (rapha), xvi. , 12, 
19, 26, 40, 48, 74, 119, 123, 135, 
260, 286, 298, 305. 341, 373, 408. 
See Agastya, Canopus, Ma, Kapha 

Argus, 281, 317, 408, 466 

Ariadne, xliii., xlv., 339 

Arianrhod, moon-goddess of the silver 
wheel, 283, 284 

Aries, Constellation of the Ram, into 
which the sun entered at the autum- 
nal equinox at the beginning of the 
cycle-year of three years, between 
14,000 and 15,000 B.C., 206, 208, 
415, 463, 551, 593, 604 

Arjuna, the third of the five Pandava 
leaders, the son and counterpart of 
Indra, the rain-god ruling first the 
rainy season and afterwards February 
— March, called after him Arjuna or 
Phalgun, when he followed Parikshit 
the sun-horse in his annual course 
round the heavens, beginning in 
Cheit, March — April, xliv., 83, 151, 
213, 218, 235, 258, 261, 275, 318, 
346, 373. 376, 426, 457, 459, 460, 
470, 4S3, 484, 485, 486, 509, 524, 
527, 528, 529, 539, 578, 581, 599 

Ark, or ship of the gods, 265 

Arna, sons of Aruna the fire-drill, 
586 

Arpachsad, Armenia, the land {a/pa) 
of the conquerors (kasidi), 137 

Arrow, marking the course of the year, 
73. 86, 89, 96, 98, 112, 173, 490, 
605 

Artemis, goddess ot the great Bear 
Arktos, 93, 102, no, 133, 134, 148, 
398, 544, 575 

Arthur or Aircin, the ploughing (ar) 
king, 72, 102, 202, 335, 336, 418, 
420, 539 

Arvalia, 189 

Aryaman, the ploughing star Arcturus 
in Bootes first, afterwards Capella in 
Auriga, 68, 85, 186, 400, 418, 460, 

503 

Aryans, Celto-Goths, conquerors of the 
Bharatas, 5S6, 587, 590, 591 

Ash, sacred mother-tree of the Edda 
and of the Centaur sons of the horse- 
headed sun-god, 29, 306, 309. See 

_Ygg-drasil. 

Ashddha, Ashur,Assur, the sun-god rul- 
ing the summer solstice, the month 
Ashadha (June — July), 91, 198, 607 



646 



Index. 



Asherah, wooden posts, the sacred tree- 
trunks of the Jews, 109, 190, 196, 
411, 544, 577.578 
Ashman, the stone-god, 42, 149 
Ashlaka or Astika, the sun-god of the 
eight {ashta) rayed star, the corn- 
god of the year of fifteen months, 
xxxvi., 270, 332, 333, 357, 390, 488, 

547 

Ashva-medha, the horse (ashva) sacri- 
fice, 99, 472, 502 

Ashvattha, the mother fig-tree (Ficus 
religiosd), the Bo or Pipal succeed- 
ing the Nigrodha (Ficus Indica), the 
Banyan-tree, 473, 483, 505 

Ashvatthaman, the god of the Ashvat- 
tha-tree, son of Drona the tree-trunk, 
whence the Soma or sap of life was 
drawn, slayer of the Panchalas, sons 
of the five (pane A) days week, 483 

Ashvins, the twin creators, who were 
first Ushasa-Nakta, day and night, 
afterwards the stars Gemini, whose 
car was drawn first by the asses and 
afterwards by the horses of the sun, 
71, 102, 206, 208, 220, 322, 356, 
370, 400, 419, 483, 493, 496, 503, 
504, 506, 520, 568, 570, 576, 600, 
603, 608, 613. 

Asipu, the interpreter, the interpreting 
god Joseph, 304, 615 

Ass, the sacred animal of the sun-god 
before the sun-horse, xxiii., xxiv., 
xxv., 198, 200, 201, 202, 206, 213, 
220, 222, 232, 262, 328, 370, 496 

Assarakos, the god of the year-bed 
(asurra), 142, 144, 146, 41 1. See 
Odusseus 

Assur, 144, 403, 410. See Ashadha 

Asura, successors of the Danava, sons 
of the Pole Star God Danu, the 
workers in metal, the sons of Diti, 
the second mother whose priests were 
the Angiras, offerers of burnt offer- 
ings, 215, 216, 230, 300, 321, 322, 
352, 356, 363, 526 

Atar or Atri, the fire-god, 107, 138, 
153, 288, 296, 353 

Ataro Patakau, the modern province 
of Adar-baijan, the petroleum-yield- 
ing Baku on the Caspian, the first 
home of the fire-worshippers after 
they left Phrygia, 153, 182 

Atergatis, the fish-mother goddess, 33. 
A variant form of Tirhatha (-which 
see) 

Athamas Tammas, 244, 397. See 
Dumu-zi 

Atharvans, Athravans, fire - priests, 



successors of the Angiras, 188, 295, 
296, 297, 353, 496 

Athene, the Boeotian Itonian goddess 
Tan or Tana of the southern mud 
(tan), 31, 32, 33 

Athene, of the olive-tree which was 
first the sacred oil plant Sesame 
(Sesamum orientate), and afterwards 
the sacred mother-tree of the Ionian 
race, whence the year-bed of Odus- 
seus was made, 31, 144, 163, 256, 
257, 258, 353, 510, 511, 513, 534, 

573.637 

Athene Pallas, the goddess of the Pal- 
ladium or national parent-god, the 
Palea or protecting grain-husk, 31, 
143. 324 note 4 

Athenians, 17, 229 

Attis, the emasculated grandfather ape- 
god of the Phrygian sons of the 
pine-tree, 151, 547 

Augurs, 222, 405, 433, 439 

Auriga, the leading constellation of 
the year of Poseidon, and Hippo- 
lytus, that of fifteen months succeed- 
ing the years ruled by the Great 
Bear, xlv., 338, 400,. 413, 418, 429, 
624, 625 

Aurva, son of the Thigh (uru), 312, 

391, 394, 395, 587 
Australian native tribes and their 

legends, 4, 23, 63, 90 
Auxesia, Azesia, 142, 162 
Avalokitesvara, 36, 333 
Aventine Hill of Cacus and Diana, 

441, 443 

Axe, the double-axe of the two lunar- 
crescents, the symbol of Parasu- 
Rama and the Carian Zeus, xliv., 
xlv., 260, 261, 512, 513, 552, 631. 

__See Parasit-Rama, Pelekus 

Ayu, the son of Time, 166, 503 

Azaf, son of Barkhya, the lightning- 
god, Vizir to Solomon or Salli- 
mannu, 50 

Azi Dahdka, the biting-snake Zend 
god of the year of three seasons, 
xxviii., 49, 155, 213 

Aziz Azazel, the scape-goat, its mean- 
ing, 142, 241 

Aztecs, 563, 566 



Ba, Baait, the southern mother of 
life, the starless abyss of the Ant- 
arctic Pale, 135, 148; also called 
Bahu (which see) 

Baal, spelt with an ain, Bahal, ue 
Indian Bagha, the god of the pee 



Index. 



647 



with the edible fruit, the Persian 

Bagh garden, the Slavonic Bog, 30S 
Baal /i?/=Iolaus, 263, 447 
Baal Makur, 263. See Melquarth 
Baal Raphon, the god of healing = 

Bellerophon, 304 (which see) 
Baal 7>"0//;fl = Trophonius, 372 
Baal Tsephon, god of the north, 37, 

76 
Babel, the gate (bab) of God (el), 600 
Babhtms, the caste to which most of 

the ruling families of Behur belong, 

162, 188 
Babls, Persian sect, 476 
Babylon, Bab-ili, the Gate (bab) of 

God, 233, 236, 303, 341 
Badagas, 122, 172 
Badr Basim, 71, 72 
Ba-Duc-chua, five Annamite goddesses, 

43 
Bagdis, 172, 356 
Bahrein, 250, 264 
Balm, Bohit, the southern mother Ba 

of the starless void of the Antarctic 

Pole, 24, 53, 63, 75, 92, 434, 438, 

489 
Baidyas, the caste of the Physicians, 

473 
Balkh, sacred city on the Oxus or 

Ji-hun, the river of life (ji), 178 
Balor, 277, 2S2, 284 
Bamboo, sacred post and weapon, 81, 

197 
Bantu races ana the musical bow, 83, 

8 7 

Banyan-tree, (Ficns Indica), parent- 
tree of the Kushikas, 26, 181, 215, 
261, 470, 596. See IS'igrodha Shar- 
mishtha 

Baptism of the Toda High Priest, 123; 
of the partakers of the Soma sacra- 
ments, 268 ; of Hindu children by 
the barbers, 345 

Baragyza, ancient port at the mouth 
of the Nerbudda, 249, 577 

Barbers, the ancient priests and sur- 
geons of the Kushikas, 202, 219, 
342 — 347, 361. See Bhandaris, Ha- 
jams, Napits 

Baresma, the magic rain (bares) wand 
of the Zends, 7, 42, 123, 227 

Bar/iis, sacred sheaves of Kusha grass 
of Hindu Kushika ritual, 226, 227, 
301. See Pitaro Barishadah 

Barley, the plant of life infused in 
Soma, and the cup of the Eleusinian 
mysteries, the plant of and offering 
to Varuna, the food of the Pitaro 
Barishadah and Gnishvattah of the 



Neolithic and Bronze Ages, 129, 

1 38, 184, 205, 220, 228, 229, 249, 
321, 323, 337. 363.. 370, 523. 624 

Barak Barkhya, the lightning-god, 
Basket-mother of the rice-baby, the corn 

sun-god, 139, 572 
Basques, Iberian race, sons of the ri- 
vers from Mt. Ararat, formed from 
the union of the northern hunters, 
Indian matriarchal farming races, 
and the Finn worshippers of the 
household fire, xxxiii. , 87, 129, 130, 

139, 140,141, 153, 2i2,_254. See 
Vasu Vasuki or Basuk Nag 

Bast, Egyptian cat -goddess, 191 

Bath-sheba, she of the seven (sheba) 
measures (bath), the seven stars of 
the Great Bear, mother of Salli- 
mannu or Solomon, the fish sun-god, 
278 

Bauris, 172, 183 

Bear, mother and her sons, who made 
the Bear their totem and painted it 
in India on their foreheads, 85, 109, 
no, 117, 118, 119, 138 

Bear, the Great Bear parent Constella- 
tion, symbolised as the mother wag- 
gon or cradle of the sun-god, the 
plough, the thigh of the ape-father- 
god, the seven Bears, the seven 
antelopes (rishya), the seven Maruts 
or tree (marom) ape mothers, the 
seven sisters of the Chamars, Rautias, 
and Kaurs, the seven pigs, the seven 
oxen (septemtriones), the seven bulls 
(haptoiringas). It was with the four 
stars of Pegasus, the ruling constella- 
ation of the eleven-months year, and 
as the Thigh of the ape-father-god, 
the parent of the sun-god of the 
fifteen-months year, xxii., xxix., xlii. , 
xliii., xlv., 85,102, 109,110, 117, 118, 
134, 138, 139, 154, 195, 197—207, 
219, 278, 304, 309, 312, 334, 336, 
376, 379, 39°, 39°, 397> 4°i> 403, 
405, 411, 413, 428, 456, 463, 480, 
4S3> 491, 504. 520, 564, 574, 611. 
See Artemis, Ixion, Kallisto, the 
Thigh constellation 

Bee, the world's beehive of the Mord- 
vinian Ugro-Finns, the bee prophet- 
esses and priests of the ancient 
world, 169, 170, 369, 417. See 
Deborah Melissai 

Beer, made of rice or Murwa (Eleitsine 
coracana), the drink of the Dravido 
Mundas, used as a sacramental drink 
by the Thibetan Buddhists, 168, 334, 
35 6 > 5oi 



6 4 8 



Index. 



Beetle, symbol of the creating full- 
moon-god of the two united cres- 
cents, 253, 532, 533, 573, 574. See 
Khepera 

Bel, the fire-god, 132, 144, 145, 147, 

193 

Belaspur, 193 

Bellerophon, the sun-physician of the 
eleven-months year, the rider on 
Pegasusi ts ruling constellation, 202, 
304, 340. See Baal Raphon 

Belt of Orion, symbolising in its three 
stars the three seasons of Orion's 
year, 89, 136, 574 

Beltis, female form of Bel, 70 

Benjamin, son of the right hand, 403 — 

4°S 

Berezi Savangha, the eastern {savangha) 
fire of rain {bares), the first of the 
five Zend sacred fires, 42, 131, 155 

Bes, Egyptian ape-god, 150, 151, 372, 

373 

Bethel Baitulos, the house (bet/i) of god, 
the divine gnomon-stone, 37, 405 

Beth-lehem, the house of Lehem or 
Lakhmu, 154, 405, 406 

Bhadra-pada (August — September) , 
xviii., 209, 225 

Bhaga, the parent-tree with the edible 
fruit, 186 

Bhaga-datta, the king of the Yavanas 
or barley-growers, son of Bhaga, 249, 
486 

Bhandaris, 342, 343 , 357 

Bharadvajas, sons of the lark, 69, 597, 
612 

Bharala, son of Kaikaia, the Gond 
mother, and Raghu, half-brother of 
Rama, and of Dushmanta and Sa- 
kuntala the little bird of the Malli 
race, father of the Bharatas, 279, 280 

Bharata-varsha, the land of the Bha- 
rata, the name given to India in the 
Mahabharata, the epic history of the 
Great Bharatas, 281 

Bharatas, 84, 279, 360, 427, 519, 562, 
567, 59i, 594, 595, 598 

Bharati or Mahi, one of the three 
mother-goddesses of the Apr! hymns 
recited at animal sacrifices, 300 

Bhars, the tribe of the Bharatas, 280, 
2S1, 360 

Bhils, the men of the bow {billa), 81, 
157, 172, 183, 338,342 

Bhima, son of Maroti the tree (marom) 
ape-god, the second of the five 
Pandava brethren ruling the summer 
season, xl. , 197, 362, 482, 527, 529, 
579 



Bhim-sen, Gond-god, xl., 165, 168 

Bhishma, called Mart-anda the dead 
egg, the sexless eighth son of Sham- 
tanu and Gunga or Aditi, the river- 
mother whose first sons were the 
seven stars of the Great Bear. The 
ruling-god of the fifteen-months year 
beginning in Magh (January — Feb- 
ruary), whose cognizance was the 
date-palm-tree, and the five stars 
ruling space with the Pole Star in 
the centre, 29, 96, 167, 424, 425, 426, 
428, 486, 502 

Bhojas, 157, 181, 317, 355, 432, 577 

Bhrign Brigus, the Indian sons of fire 
descended from the Thracian Bru-ges, 
the first priests before the Afigiras, 
135, 183, 186, 201, 216, 224, 230, 
295, 296, 297 

Bhuiya, 16, 192, 521 

Bhujyu, the Tugra year-god, 633, 634, 
638, 641 

Bhumij, 449 

Bhnnhiars, Ooraon tenure-holders, an- 
swering to the Welsh Uchelwyr, 288, 
289, 290 

Bhurishravas , 178, 179 

Bil-gi or Gi-bil, Akkadian fire-god, 
xxi.j xxviii., 45, 283 

Billah, the old wife of Jacob, mother 
of Dan, the Pole Star god, 403, 411, 
416 

Bindo-bird, the cloud-bird of the Song 
of Lingal, which brings up the rains 
of the monsoon, 156, 170 

Bird-mother, xv., xvi. , 22, 55, 63, 95, 
96, 97, 125, 166, 192, '235, 275, 
279, 298, 337, 470, 474. See Adrika, 
Khu, Su, Hu, Kirke, Rukh 

Black-Virgin, 134 — 137 

Blood, generative efficiency of, in the 
theology of the animal Totem-gods, 
xxxiii., 185, 223, 224, 244, 320, 629 

Blood-bath, to wash away guilt, in 
Phrygian theology, 188 

Boar sun-god ruling Orion's year, 83, 
189, 275, 334, 335, 456, 458, 554 

Boaz, the golden-pillar-god of the two 
pillars before all Phoenician and 
Egyptian temples, the husband of 
Rahab, the alligator constellation 
Draco, 379, 380, 396, 407 

Boomerang, 3, 81 

Bootes, the guardian constellation of 
the year-cows, 68, 326, 425, 459 

Booths Feast of the Saka, its history as 
the festival inaugurating the year, 49, 
233> 234, 235, 236, 242, 404. See 
Sakut, Succoth 



Index. 



649 



Boreas, xxiv., 43, 305, 329, 408 

Borsippa, the artificial Holy Hill or 
High Place near Babylon, 142, 144, 
227, 233 

Bow, History of, as the bow of the 
Indian Bhils, the musical bow of the 
Bantu of Africa, the Indian Mundas, 
the Pinaka of Shiva, 81, 83, 85, 114. 
As the weapon of the year-gods 
Hayagriva, the god with the horse's 
(haya) neck (griva), Eurytos, Arjuna, 
and Odusseus, 337, 346, 426, 459 

Brahmins, sons of the black antelope 
worshippers of the white year-pig 
Vishnu, and reciters of the national 
history, 135, 158, 188, 297, 307 

Bran, the raven Celtic god, xiv., xvi., 
64, 65 

Bratsvo, Bauerschaft, 3S5, 386 

Bres, Celtic god of war king of the 
Fomori or men beneath (fo) the sea 
(muir), the husband and son of Bri- 
git, which see, 70, 71, 277 

Bridge of Heaven, the Milky Way, 
the yearly path of the sun-god, 74, 

77 . 

Brihas-pati, Brahi/iaiias-pati, the Pole 
Star god, 68, 69, 142, 178,317,400, 
500, 506 

Brihali, the Sanskrit equivalent of the 
Celtic Brigit or Bride, the goddess 
of the thirty-six five-day weeks of 
the half of the whole year of seventy- 
two weeks, making up the Pleiades 
year, the solstitial sun-year of two 
seasons each, and Orion's year of 
three seasons, xiii., xiv., 65, 66, 67, 
68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 105, 166, 210, 
277, 278, 611 

Brisaya, the sorcerers of the Rigveda, 

131 
Brito-marlis, the cypress- tree (berut) 

mother of the sun-god, 29 
Bronze Age, I77> 3 J 7, 348. 35 *. 498, 

562 
Bru-ges of Thrace, ancestors of the 

Phrygians, and the Indian Bhrigu, 

130, 183, 201 
Brythonic Cells, 201, 273, 274, 277, 

343- 403 . 
Buddha, his history in his successive 
births, first as a national year-god, 
the god of wisdom and knowledge, 
the Indian equivalent of Odin in 
the Edda, and secondly as an inspired 
teacher invested by his disciples with 
the attributes of the previous year- 
gods recorded in their ritualistic 
history, xxvii., xxviii., 30, 36, 91, 



104, 242, 330, 331, 413, 463—481, 

498, 530, 5 6 9, 6 °7 
Budur, the full-moon year-goddess of 

the cycle-year, 285, 287 
Bull, buffalo cow and calf, successive 

rulers of the year, xiv., 25, 83, 101, 

120, 197, 198, 211, 223, 323, 349, 

350, 35!> 352 
Burials of Neolithic Age, Position of 

bodies, 267, 268 
Byblos, an Akkadian Phoenician city, 

xxviii., 45 
Byga, Primaeval provincial priests of 

India, 13, 15 

Cacus, 165, 441, 442, 443, 446 
Caduceus, 160 

Caer Sidi, the world's Turning Tower, 
the revolving earth, xvi., 64, 249, 

315 

Caleb, his history as the dog {kalb), 
the year star-god Sirius, 366, 367, 
376, 4°5 

Calypso, the goddess concealing («a- 
XvitTw) the year-god Odusseus, xliv., 
512, 513, 632, 635 

Cancer, its history as a zodiacal con- 
stellation ruling the cycle-year of 
three years, xviii., 174, 207, 208, 311, 
316 

Canopus, xiv., xxi., 24, 28, 32, 38, 40, 
43, 48, 63, 64, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 
87, 144, 174, 260. See Agastya 

Capella, the star of the little goat in 
Auriga, ruling the fifteen-months 
year of Poseidon and Hippolytos in 
super-session'of the Great Bear, xiv., 
340, 341, 400, 418, 419 

Capricornus, the star of the goat with 
the fish's tail, the star of the dolphin 
mother-fish Makara, 177, 414, 415 

Carians, worshippers of the god sym- 
bolised by the double axe of the two 
lunar crescents and the sun-cock, 

255 . 
Carislia, 437 
Carmenlalia, 435 
Carnac, 254, 266, 267, 368, 435, 

58i 

Carnival, 242. 451 

Caroline Islands, 1 1 

Castes, formed from the unions of 
members of the village communities 
of the matriarchal age. These were 
changed by the Naga Kushikas into 
communities united by community of 
function as trade guilds, 352, 362 

Castor, the unsexed beaver twin-god, 
xix., 436. See Kastor 



650 



Index. 



Cat, 161, 416, 623 

Cauldron of Lije, of Bran the raven- 
god of the Southern sun, xvi., 64, 
71, 72, 278, 279 

Cecrops, 24S 

Celtic races. 138, 273, 288, 289, 290, 
291, 338, 347, 363, See Brythonic 
and Goidelic Celts 

Centaur, 640 

Centaurs, 149, 306, 515, 517, 518 

Ceres, 168, 189, 523 

Cerfia Tursa, 544, 546. See Tursa 
Cerfia 

Cerfus Martius, 543, 544, 545. See 
Mars 

Ceri, the three pedestal-gods carried 
in the May circumambulation at 
Gubbio, 439, 545, 547, 548, 549, 551, 

552, 553, 554, 556 

Cernunnos, the horned deer-sun-god 
of the Celts, 88, 93 

Ceylon, xiv., 37, 63,209, 238, 252, 274 

Chakra-varti, or wheel-turning kings, 
317, 362, 474 

Chaldceans, Kalda, 48 

Chalkeia, 58 

Chamars, Hindoo workers in leather, 
their history, 217, 219, 220, 223, 
236, 285, 343, 348 

Champa, 212, 519 

Chandra, the moon-god husband of the 
Nakshatra, 65 

Chandra - Kushika, father of Jara- 
sandha, the son of Kakshivat, the 
father-god of the eleven -months 
year, 120, 195, 311 

Charlies, 515 

Charybdis = Canopus, 632, 633 

Chatur-masiya, 101, 184 

Chedi, 190 

Cheiron, the Centaur physician, 305, 
306, 491 

Cheit, March — April, month of the 
Sal water festival of the Mundas and 
Ooraons, and of the sacrifice of the 
sun-horse Parikshit, 242, 485, 486. 
See Chitra 

Cherubim, 600, 601 

Chimcera, the symbol ot the three years 
cycle-year destroyed by Bellerophon 
or Baal Raphon the sun-physician, 
3°4, 640 

Chinese, 5,30, 139, 337, 347, 522 

Chiroos, sons of the bird (chir) the sun- 
falcon of Asia Minor, 40, 108, 109, 
146, 153, 190, 216, 302, 342, 343,348 

Chista, in Zend theology the Chest of 
the law, the Ephod which inspired 
the priest, 262, 297 



Chitra ( Virgo), 316, 318, 327, 341, 486, 
586 

Chitrangada, 425, 486 

Chiun, the pillar, 230, 246 

Chiusi {Clusium), 264 

Chnum or Khnum, the Egyptian Potter- 
god, 150, 377 

Cholas, Kols, Kola-Hans, 40 

Churruk, or Swinging Ptija, 345 

Chutia Nagpur, the mother {Chut) land 
of the Nagas, 3, 10, 12, 13, 16, 22, 
36, 82, 83, 108, 127, 128, 170, 192, 

193, 194, 196, 198, 248, 268, 287, 
288, 289, 292, 343, 352, 358, 359, 
360, 362, 485, 558, 567 

Chuttis-gurh, 14, 82, 134, 192, 193, 

194, 219, 292, 300, 443 
Chyavana, the moving god, 391, 394, 

395, 411, 419, 503 

Cinderella, Annamite story of, 59, 
60, 64, 411 

Cinna?non, brought by Phoenicians 
from Ceylon, 252 

Circe, 523, 549. See Kirke 

Circuits of the altar and national boun- 
daries. Left-hand circuits prescribed 
in the Pre-solar ritual, changed to 
right-hand circuits those of the male 
Su-astika in the solar ritual of 
Book III., xxxix, 98, 99, 225, 226, 

227, 35i ; 45.9, 543, 544, 57*, 572 

Circumcision, introduced from Colchis 
in the Stone Age, its existence in 
Mexico, 355, 379, 405, 566 

Cities of the Dead ol the Akkadians and 
Mundas of Chutia Nagpur, 85, 437 

Clyte?nnestra, sister twin of Kastor, 
508 

Cocks and hens in the ritual of India, 
South Western Asia and Europe, 
xxxv., 90, 255, 256, 525 

Common meals, a social institution ot 
the early matriarchal village commu- 
nities and its extension to Europe, 1 1 

Conchobar, 283, 284 

Consus, a Roman god, Consualia, 243, 
441, 446, 448 

Copper Age, intervening between the 
Neolithic and Bronze Ages, 34S, 352, 
361 

Copper-mines of Chutia Nagpur and 
Udaipur, 359, 364 

Cord, The sacrificial, the ritual re- 
quiring it to be worn on the right 
shoulder in the Pole Star Age 
traced to India, Umbria and 
Mexico. It was first worn as a girdle 
round the waist, the year-girdle of 
the early gods and priests ; lastly in 



Index. 



65 T 



the solar age on the left shoulder, 
225, 227, 257, 351, 403, 543, 571 

Corinth, II, 135, 446 

Corn-baby, 139, 452, 570, 572 

Corona Borealis, xliii. , xlv. , 339. See 
Ariadne 

Corvus, the constellation ruling the West, 
426, 456, 485 

Cotton, 251, 252 

Cotton tree, sacred to the Indian Ash- 
vins and the snake and antelope 
gods of the Mexican Sias,25i,395,570 

Coicvade, a custom introduced by the 
Basques from Iberia in Asia Minor 
and brought to Europe and Ireland its 
historical significance, 129, 130, 440 

Cradle of the Sun-god (the Great Bear), 

85, 453 
Crete, Cretans, xliii. — xlv., 11, 17, 29, 

33, 148, 162, 171, 229, 263, 370, 404, 

5o8, 590 
Cro-Magnon, men of, 86, 87, 88, no, 

in, H2, 113, 116, 121 
Cross, first the solstitial St. Andrew's 

cross j{ secondly, the fire-cross of 
St. Anthony, the cross of the fire- 
worshippers J , thirdly, the equi- 
lateral upright cross of St. George 
—J— the cross of the cycle-year found 

at the autumnal equinox when the 
cycle began with the entry of the Ram 
sun into Aries. The union of the 
solstitial cross with that of St. George 
formed the eight-rayed Star {winch 
see), xli., 68, 151, 222, 223, 270, 271, 
378, 546, 566, 571 

Crucifixion of Hainan or Baal Kham- 
man as the year-god of the dying 
year of eleven months, 303 

Cu-chulainn, the hound of Cu, Celtic 
sun-god, 137, 202, 407, 408, 440, 
488, 489, 490 

Cups of the seasons made by the 
Indian Ribhus, 99, 145, 163, 301, 
500, 501, 502, 511 

Curia, 323, 437 _ 

Cybele, the Phrygian cave-mother of the 
sons of the pine-tree, 56, 92, 116, 121, 
201, 223, 231, 232, 302,379 

Cyclopccan architecture, 26, 262, 263, 
264 

Cyclops, the one-eyed Pole Star-god, 
124, 133, 168 

Cygnus, Pole Star in, xl., 97, 311. Sec 
Ambika 

Cyniri, followers of Flu the bird, 63, 
165, 2S8, 289, 290, 291, 293 



Cypress, mother-tree of the Phoenicians, 
and of their sun-god, 29, 93, 204, 

275. 335 
Cyprus, 177, 189, 216, 390 

Dadhiank, the god with the horse's 
head ruling the eleven -months year, 
27, 294, 295, 298, 314, 352, 431, 496, 

504, 549 

Dagda, Dago-devos, father of Briget the 
Celtic Daksha, 65, 69, 71 

Dakota, the joined races who repro- 
duced the Indian swinging sacrifice 
in America, 345 

Daksha, the god of the showing hand 
ruling the year of the five-days week, 
6 5> 69, 71, 186, 278, 425, 426, 456, 

635 

Dakshina, the southern semi-circular 
altar of the earlier Hindu fathers, the 
Pitarah Somavantah sons of the 
crescent moon, 226, 227 

Dakshiudthya's, the people of the 
South, 584 

Daktuloi, the finger (SoktuAos) danc- 
ing priests of the god of the five-days 
week, 136, 263, 572 

Da/na, Dame, Damia, the house 
builders, sons of the tortoise, 100, 
156, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 167, 
176 

Damayanti. Set Nala 

Dan, Danu, or Da nil, the female 
form, the Pole Star god father of the 
Indian Danava, the Greek Danaoi, 
the Zend sons of Danu, the Hebrew 
sons of Dan, xxxi., 9, 26, 27, 39, 66, 
79, 100, 211, 230, 276, 277, 282, 
349. 376, 416, 516 

Dauac, female form of Danu, mother 
of Perseus, the sun-god born in the 
tower of the three-years' cycle-year, 
282, 283 

Danaus, 456 

Danava, Danaoi, sons of Danu in 
India and Greece, xxxi., 26, 27, 29, 
66, 100, 130, 216, 230, 376, 403, 526 

Dances held on the seasonal festivals 
in the Indian village Akra and the 
Temenoi or consecrated enclosures 
of the temples of South-western Asia, 
Europe and Mexico, their origin 
and the reason of their institution, 
3, 16, 56, 136, 163, 179, 187, 23S, 

239,449, 555, 556, 57o, 57i, 572 
Dara, Darda, the antelope-father-god, 
140, 142, 151, 152 

anions, sons of Dara, 143, 147, 
148, 152, 265 



652 



Index. 



Dards of Dardistan, 151, 152, 348 

Darn,, intoxicating drink of the Gonds 
and early Hindus, 160, 171, 329. 
See Madhu, Mead, Sura. 

Daricka, the inspired charioteer of 
Krishna the antelope-god, called 
Madhava or drinker of Mahua, the 
drink fermented from Mahua flowers, 
otherwise called Daru, 329 

Dasahara, the year festival of the 
autumnal equinox at which a buffalo 
is sacrificed, 219, 223, 317, 349, 350 

Dasaratha, he of the ten (dasa) chariots 
{rath), the ten lunar-months of ges- 
tation, father of Rama, also called 
Raghu, 211, 355 

Dashagva, the ruling-gods of the ten- 
days week of the last Vedic year 
and of that of the Egyptians and 
Athenians, 611 

Dashapeya sacrifice, 68, 400 

Dasyn, dwellers in the land {desk), 
sons of Agastya {Canopies), 108, 109 

David, Dodo or Dod, the beloved sun- 
god of the Semites, the sun-god of 
the eight-rayed star and the eight- 
days week, 380, 406, 417, 421, 422. 
See Dido. 

Deborah, the Bee prophetess queen- 
bee of the national hive, of which 
the priestesses were called Melissai, 
the bees, 169, 369, 390 

Dechtere, Daegter, the day {daeg) mother 
of light, mother of the sun -god Lug, 
283 

Dedai 1, 51 

Deer-sun-god, the god first worshipped 
in the North, xxxix., xlii., 88, 89, 91, 
92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 101, 125, 126. 
See Orion, Reindeer 

Delos, 148 

Delphi, the womb {delphus) of the 
Greek race, 32, 369, 383 

Demeter Deo, the mother of barley 
{deai) and of life {di, the Greek form 
of the Akkadian zi) ruling with Per- 
sephone the May Queen, the Pleiades 
year of two seasons beginning in 
November, xxiv. , xxxvii., 33, 59, 62, 
85, 134. 137, 139, 168, 369, 401, 402 

Demodokos, his historical lay in the 
Odyssey, 514 

Derketo. See Tirhatha 

Dervishes, dancing-priests consecrated 
to the service of the Pole Star god 
by the Kamberiah or three -knotted 
cord dedicated to the three stars of 
Orion's belt, the three seasons of his 
year, xlv., 136, 239, 257, 613, 636 



Des-aidi, Deszvali, Santal and Munda 
god, protector of the land, the guar- 
dian village-god, 520, 521 

Deva-qlaru {Pinus deodara), its ritual- 
istic use and meaning, 302, 561 

Devaki, mother of Krishna, the black 
antelope-god, her eighth son, 189, 
427, 428, 429 

Devapi, the rain-priest, the central god 
in the triad of Sham-tanu, Devapi, 
Vahlika, 178 

Devasena, 525 

Devaydm, Devayana, the goddess- 
mother of the Devayana or first six 
months of the solstitial year begin- 
ning at the winter solstice, the grow- 
ing mother-months of spring and 
early summer, daughter of Ushana 
the rain-god {which see), second wife 
of Yayati the full-moon (yd) god, 
and mother of the twin parent-gods 
Yadu arid Turvasu {which see), 22, 
181, 215, 216, 570, 604 

Dhanuk, the men of the bow, the 
archer-caste, 343, 344. See Bow 

Dhanv - antari, the internal {antari) 
flowing-stream {dhanva) of thought, 
the parent-god of the Baidyas or 
Physicians, son of the sacred bunch 
of Kusha grass, 473, 474 

Dharma, the god of law and order, 
the Pole Star god, 108, 368, 373, 580 

Dharti, the goddess-mother of the 
streams (dhard), the river-mother, 
127, 309, 521. See Gan-dhari 

Dhaumya, the son of smoke (dhumo), 
the incense-offering priest of the 
Pandavas, 175, 248, 327 

Dhishnya, the eight priests' hearths in 
the Soma consecrated area, 103, 609, 
610 

D/i7'ita-rdshtra,he who upholds {dhrita) 
the kingdom (rashtra), the blind god 
of the gnomon-stone or the trunk of 
the central world's tree, son of Am- 
bika, the Pole Star in Cygnus, and 
husband of Gan-dhari, the Pole Star 
Vega, son of Vyasa, the alligator 
constellation Draco, the ruling-king 
of India in the age of the Maha- 
bharata, 97, 108, 309, 310, 411,482, 

527 
Dhruva, the Pole Star, 484, 503 
Dhu-ti, the bird {dhu) of life (ti), the 

Egyptian recorder of time, xx., 55, 

533. 534 
Diana, The Etruscan Tana, the god- 
dess-mother of groves, 34, 443, 445, 
452 



Index. 



653 



Diarmait, the Celtic year-god who 
killed the year-boar-god on the last 
day of the year, 275 

Dibali, Dipavali, Dezvali, the feast of 
lamps held in India to celebrate 
the beginning of the Pleiades year, 
322 

Dido, the female form of Dod, Dodo, 
or David {which see), 241, 639 

Diffrobani ( Ceylon), 63 

Dlksha, baptismal consecration of the 
Indian partakers of the Soma sacra- 
ment, 480 

Dil-gan, Lord (dil) of the land {gan), 
the star Capella, 340 

Dil-mun, the island of God (dil), Bah- 
rein, 250 

Dimvaka, 196 

Dinah, female form of Dan, 527, 530 

Diugir, the creating ear of corn, the 
eight-rayed star, 270 

Diomedes, winner of the sun-race, son 
of Tydeus, the hammer (tad) god, 
the Northern smith, his mytho- 
logical history, 148, 507, 508, 511, 
516 

Dionysia, 244, 398 

Dionysos, son of Semele, the Phoe- 
nician goddess Pen Samlath or 
Shemiramot, also the god born of 
the Thigh, stars of the Great Bear, 
xliv., 56, 243, 244, 259, 315, 316, 
326, 347, 380, 397, 398, 399, 627 

Dipankara, 463. See Aries 

Dirgha-tamas, the blind god of the 
long (dirgha) darkness (tamas) of the 
three-years cycle, father of Kak- 
shivat, god of the eleven-months 
year, 199, 311, 503 

Dili, 216 

Divo-dasa, 586 

Dodona, 28 

Doe, the mother-star-goddess, 89, 445. 
See Aldebaran RohinI 

Dog of the Fire-worshippers, Dog Star, 
73, 74, 1x3, 116, 183, 184, 185, 1S6, 

237. 350. 378, 44o, 456, 457, 579, 
580, 622, 623. See Argus, Caleb 
Dogs, sacrifice of, 184, 185, 186 
Dokana, the stars Gemini, door-posts 

of heaven, 222 
Doliko-kcphalic races, 80, 115, 1 16 
Dolmens, Palaeolithic altars, Neolithic 
tombs, 105, 107, 207, 268, 269, 272, 
273,. 300 
Dolphin mother-goddess and constel- 
lation, 176, 177, 446, 629, 638, 641 
Doms, early rulers of Ayodhya (Oude), 
17, 161, 162 



Dorians, sons of the Spear (dor), 11, 
17, 229, 254, 341, 383 

Dorji, the double-thunderbolt of the 
two solstitial seasons, the parent of 

the six-rayed star, yj\ 157, 160 

Dosadhs, priests of Ra-hu, 57, 165, 
187, 188, 308 

Dove, the spirit-bird of the age of the 
worship of the olive-tree, 90, 230, 
231,421 

Draco, constellation of, 97, 119, 134, 
137, 144, 320, 329, 349, 384, 412. 
See Alligator, Vyasa 

Draupnir, the ring of Odin, the year- 
god, 455 

Dravidiaus, Dravida, menof the yellow 
race of the Dravida (Curcuma Zed- 
oaria), the wild Turmeric Bun Huldi 
(see Turmeric), the sacred plant of the 
mixed Malayan races, 9, 12, 15, 18, 
21, 44, 62, 71, 74, 80, 81, 108, 120, 
187, 194, 203, 243, 266, 341, 536 

Dravido Mundas, 74, 77, 92, 168 

Drishtha-dyumna, the seen (drishtha) 
bright one (dyumna), god of the 
sacrificial flame, leader of the Pan- 
chalas, men of the five-days week, 

529 

Drolma, 36 

Drona, the parent tree-trunk contain- 
ing the Soma or sap of life, the 
hollowed Soma receptacle and the 
leader of the Kauravyas, 183, 196, 

204,483, 5 I0 > 544, 597 
Druhyu, the race of sorcerers (druh), 

157, 215, 592, 594 
Druids, priests of the oak-tree, xiv., 

xxi., xxxi., 28, 62, 282, 297, 310, 

479, 615 

Drum, the magic drum of the Finns 
and Lapps, 79 

Drupada, the foot (pada) of the tree 
(dru), the tree-pillar-god of the 
Panchalas, 135, 185 

DrTipadJ, the tree (dru) mother-god- 
dess of the Kadamba almond-tree 
ruling the rainy season, wife of the 
five Pandava season gods, 171, 327, 
426, 462, 470, 482, 526, 528, 529, 

579 

Dry stan (Tristram), 336 

Dumu-zi, the son (dumu) of life (zi), 
the Akkadian god, son of the 
mother-tree, the star Orion, 29, 30, 
31, 59. 110, T39, 154, 167, 335, 369, 
511, 517, 628 

Duodecimal method of time measure- 
incut, 103, 458, 469 



654 



Index. 



Durga, the mother-mountain-goddess, 
99, 191, 235, 318, 349^ 429, 473, 
475, 481. See Su-bhadra 

Durga Puja, 210, 235 

Durva, Pole Star brick, 606 

Duryodhana, the leader of the Kaura- 
vyas, ruling god of the eleven- 
months year, the god of the left 
thigh, 82, 151, 180, 213, 309, 310, 
374, 482, 483, 509 

Dushmanta, 280, 597 

Dus-shala, 527 

Dus-shdsana, the ill-omened (dus) 
moon-hare (s/iasa) god of the eleven- 
months year, 482, 526 

Dwarf-gods, 149, 168, 265, 358 

Dwarika, the Yadava port in Khatia- 
war, 249, 283, 318, 578 

Dyaks, 19 

Dyu, 424. See Bhishma 

Easter, 538, 539, 540, 541, 548, 549, 

559 

Easter eggs, 538 

Easter J stand, 114 

Eber, Iberian father of the Hebrews, 

137. 139, 593 
Ebony, history of its ritualistic use, 51, 

I33> 134, 135= J 36 
Eburones, rulers of the country of the 
Ardennes, 109, 558 

Echtemach, Whitsuntide Procession at, 

554,555.556, 557, 553 
Edom, land of the red-men, 230, 3S0, 

417 

Education of the early founders of vil- 
lages, xi., xii., xxv. — xxvii., 11, 12, 
17, 18 

Eel-god of the Iberian sons of the 
rivers, xxxiii., 126, 127, 128, 129, 

133, 153, 155, I9i» 205. 4"- See 

Ida. 
Egyptians, 17, 56, 189, 229 
Eight-rayed star, the symbol of the 

sun-god of corn of the fifteen-months 

year, formed from the union of the 

solstitial cross of St. Andrew \f 
with the equilateral cross of St. 
George — |— of the equinoctial year 
of the three-years cycle, 38, 270, 
271, 365, 377, 3 8 °, 39o, 406, 424, 
454, 455, 47°, 473, 474, 480, 530. 
See Ashtaka Cross. 

Eileithcia, 446 

Ek-ashtaka, 332, 448 

Elam, the land of the mountaineer 
Akkadians, 87, 153, 154, 378, 500 



Eleusinian mysteries, 140, 523 

Eleven-months year of the Head of the 

Sun-horse, 272, 294, 295, 298, 299, 

300, 302, 303, 304, 308, 309, 314, 

319, 323, 327, 333, 334, 357, 371, 

379, 430, 45 !, 468, 47°, 5 02 , 5°3> 

6 3* . 7. 

Eli-tm, Elias, Eh-jah, the Phoenician 

rain-god called El-khudr, the creat- 
ing water (vBcap), 126, 127, 222, 247. 
See St.- George 

Emasculation a ritualistic rite, 232, 
260, 460 

Entenamasluv, the constellation Hydra, 
the divine foundation of the prince 
of the Black Antelope, 367, 373 

Eochaid, Celtic sun-god, 202 

Ephesus, 133, 369 

Ephod, the Chista of the Zendavesta, 
its ritualistic history, 262, 274, 297, 

380, 390, 430 

.Ephraim, the son of the god Joseph, 
the tribe of the two ashes (ephra) 
uniting the sun-worshippers with the 
devotees of the star and moon- 
worship, 377, 530 

Epidau7-us consecrated to ^Esculapius, 
the divine physician, 163, 164, 255 

Epona, the British white horse sun- 
goddess, 476, 539 

Erech, the first recorded city in the 
land of Shinar the Euphratean Delta, 
48 

Erectheus, Ericthonius, the holy snake- 
god of the Erectheum, Athens, the 
equivalent of Poseidon, xxiv., 57, 
143, 152, 163, 248, 357, 369 

Erz-du-Eri-duga, the holy (duga) city 
(eri) the sea-port of Erech, 29, 48, 

55 

Erina-vach, she who speaks the speech 
Iran, the land of the sons of Ida-Ira, 
the second wife of Azi-dakaka and 
Thraetaona, 155, 170, 176. See 
Savangha-vach 

Erycina, Erigone, the Phoenician Erek- 
hayim, the star Virgo, 325, 326, 372, 
374, worshipped at Rome on the 23rd 
April, St. George's Day, 325 

Esau, Usof Uzava, the goat and green 
pillar parent-god, 142, 246, 403 

Eshmun, Eshvian. Esh-shu, the Phoe- 
nician and Akkadian eighth god 
called Paian, the healer offspring of 
the seven Thigh-stars of the Great 
Bear, 270, 365, 390 

Esther, the equivalent of Istar, the 
destroyer of the eleven-months year, 
303, 451 



Index. 



655 



Etruscans, 17, 229, 263, 264, 266, 402 
Eugubine Tables, 257, 542, 544, 545, 

547, 553 
Eumelus, the overthrown god of the 

chariot race of Achilles, 507, 509,510 
Euphrates, the river of the channel 

Nahr or Nahor, the mother-river of 

the Gaurian race and of the sons of the 

antelope, 56, Si, 125, 139 
Europa, the goddess of the West {ereb), 

sister of Kadmus the god of the East 

(Kedem), xxi., 636 
Euntpulos, 490, 491 
Eurydice, year-mother raised from the 

dead by Orpheus the Greek Ribhu, 

314 

Eurynome, Eurykleia, Erebh-noema, 

27, 209, 459, 460 
Eurytion, Eurytos, 307, 460, 518 

Fafnir, the snake-god slain by the 
sun-god Sigurd, 185, 186, 296, 352, 
568 

Father-gods, first worshipped by the sons 
of the eel and antelope, 131, 169. See 
Kabiri 

Faunus, 121, 196 

Faunus, Italian deer-sun-god, xxxix., 
461 

Feast to the dead beginning the year, 
the dates varying according to the 
National New Year's Day, xiv., 
xxxviii., 34, 58, 59, 1S5, 219, 224, 
225, 226, 228, 234, 399, 437 

Ferite Marti, 239 

FeritB Sementivce or Paganalia, 436 

Fifty Pentecostal days passed by the sun- 
god in reaching his perfect develop- 
ment, a ritualistic epitome of the 
history of successive year-reckonings, 
474, 480, 481 

Fig-tree, parent-tree of the Syrians and 
Kushika, 29, 40, 144, 380, 411. See 
Ashvattha, Banyan, Udumbara 

Fiji, Fiji an s, II, 114 

Finns, xvii., xxiii., 36, 79, 80, 81, 86, 
89, 109, 122, 126, 131, 193, 201, 216, 

278, 356, 357. 5 2 ° 

Fir Folg, men of the Bag or Womb, a 
Celtic race who traced their descent 
to the ten months of gestation into 
which the cycle-year was divided, 
275, 277, 284,440 

Fir Domnann, sons of the goddess of 
the deep Domini, 202, 275, 277, 284 

Fire, sanctity of, 3, 42, 43, 170, 228 

Fire-drill and socket, creating gods of 
the lire-dog, the dog-star Sinus and 
of the household and national lire- 



parents on earth of the tree-fire 
socket Kadru, the tree of Ka the thir- 
teenth wife of Kashyapa, and mother 
of the Naga races. The Khadira tree 
Acacia Catechu of which the ritual- 
istic fire-drill, and the eleven sacri- 
ficial stakes of the' eleven-months- 
year were made, 58, 183, 221, 561 

Fire-mother, the mother-goddess of the 
yellow Finn race of the Licchavis, 
sons of the Akkadian Lig, the dog, 
the race called in the Rigveda Sau- 
naka or sons of the dog {sva?i), whose 
mother - goddess was Matarisvan, 
the- mother of the dog. They were 
the originators of the Jain doctrines, 
.161, 363 

Fires, kindling of years'-fires on the 
national New Year's Day in Asia, 
Europe and America, xliv., 58, 62, 
185, 235, 263, 453, 564, 565, 566 

First fruits the original sacrifice of the 
village races, 57, 59, 135, 140, 248, 
344 

Fish-god, the mother-fish, the eel, the 
Finnic Il-ja, the mother-goddess 
Ida, Ila, or Ira, the little fish of 
Manu who became the mother- 
dolphin, the horned-fish ; and she 
became the fish - father - god Nun 
of the Akkadians, Egyptians and 
Hebrews, who was finally the year- 
god Salli-mannu or Solomon, the wise 
fish ruling the year. The belief in 
the fish-mother originated in the 
history of the birth of life from the 
Southern Ocean and from the Indian 
mother-sun-fish, the Rohu, which 
hybernates in the mud during the 
hot weather which dries up the pool 
in which she lives, 33, 50, 71, 126, 

176, 177, 230, 378, 4IO, 499. ScC 

Dolphin, Eel, Pisces, Cetus 

Five sanctified as the five-days week 
which in various symbolic forms lies 
at the base of the history of the 
reckoning of time, xiv., 23, 41, 42, 
45, 47, 65, 210, 387 

Flamen Quirinalis, 243 

Flamines, xxi. 

Flaminiea Dialis, 540, 553 

Flax, the mother-planet of the weaving 
immigrants into India from Asia, 
who reverenced it as Uma Flax, the 
wife of Shiva, 83, 250, 251, 559. 
See Uma 

Flint knives, ceremonial use of, 123, 

379 
Flood legend, 95 



656 



Index 



Flora, festival of, 445 

Fo-mori, men beneath (fo) the sea 
(muir), a name of a Celtic ruling 
race who remembered the birth of 
their ancestors in the lands south of 
the Equator, xvii., xxxi., 70, 71, 
202, 485, 539, 599 

Fomicaria, feast of roasted grain, 436, 

437 
Forty made sacred as the number of 
mouths in the three-years cycle- 
year, xlvi., 203, 206, 2IO, 211, 222, 

37o, 371, 376 

Four periods, each of ten lunar months 
of gestation of the cycle-year, xli., 
xlvi., 203. Four seasons of the 
eleven-months year ruled by stars, 
367,373, 403, 511 

Frangrasyan, Turanian king of the 
Fryano, or sons of the Viru or 
phallus, 173, 174, 182, 247 

Frashaostra, the Zend teaching-priest, 
equivalent of the Indian Prashastri, 
xxvi., 170, 171 

Fravashis, the dead mothers of the 
Zend races, 169, 185 

Frey, the deer-sun-god of the North, 
88, 93, 146, 

Freya, his twin-sister and consort, who 
was first the doe-goddess and after- 
wards became the sun-hawk, 88, 
146, 191 

Fryano, the Turanian Zend sons of 
the Viru or phallus, 131, 170 

Fuflans, Etruscan god = Palaimon, 641 



Gadura, Garuda, the egg-born bird of 
light, the sun-bird born of the egg 
laid by Vinata, the tenth wife of 
Kashyapa, father of the Kushites, 
the bird who sat on the year-chariot 
of Krishna, the sun-antelope de- 
picted as sitting on the sacred posts, 
survivals of the mother-tree round 
the Indian temples, xxxix., 197, 
461, 562 

Gai, Gai-bolga, weapon of Cu-chulainn, 
the Celtic sun-god, the heavenly 
fire-drill, 137, 275 

Gailioin, sons of the Gai, 202, 275 

Galava, the pure Soma and the tree 
from which the red powder thrown 
at the Huli spring festival is made, 
473> 474, 483 

Galli, the unsexed priests of Cybele, 
220, 232 

Gandhara, the river (dhara) land (gan) 
Seistan, 310 



Gan-dhari, the river-mother (d/idri) 
of the land, the Vulture Pole Star 
Vega, bird-mother of the Kauravyas, 
xvi., xvii., xl., 97, 309, 310, 311 

Gan-diva, the god of the land (gan), 
the bow of Arjuna, 346, 579 

Gan-isha, the lord (isha) of the land 
(gan), the elephant-headed rain-god, 
the first impersonation of the Buddha, 
who was first the cloud- bird, xxxv., 
30, 350, 464, 471, 472, 479, 498 

Ganymede, a male and female god, 
filler of the cups of the seasons, 145, 
5o7 

Gao-kerena, Go-kard, or White Horn- 
tree, 25 

Garden of God guarded by the Stars 
Gemini, xxxiv., 221 — 223, 252, 286, 
371, 435, 600 

Garha-patya, the mistress (paly a) of 
the house, the circular Hindu fire- 
altar, 103, 226, 227, 228, 606 

Gauri, the wild cow, the Indian god- 
dess, the wild cow Gaur, mother of 
the men of Gutium, the land of the 
bull (gut) and of the Indian race of 
Gautuma, 84, 344 

Gaurian race, 80, 81, 83, 84, 122 

Gautuma, father of the bull (gut) and 
cow (go), and his sons the Gautuma, 
also the Bear race, 84, 120, 124, 146, 
*75, 255, 311, 312, 313, 361, 546, 
575 

Gayatrl, eight-syllabled metre con- 
secrated to the fire-god of the eight- 
days week of the fifteen-months year, 

66 > 3%, 392, 394. 493, 494, 496, 
602, 608 
Gemini, the twin stars, guardians of 
the gate of the Garden of God 
through which the sun entered at 
the yearly beginning of his circular 
course round the heavens, xxiv. , 147, 
221, 222, 230, 233, 371, 391, 394, 
401, 433, 435, 447, 463, 464, 485, 

539, 599 
George, St., the ploughing-god of 
Syria, Asia Minor and Greece, the 
worker (ovpyos) of the land (yv), 
originally the ploughing-stars of the 
Great Bear, the god of the equi- 
lateral equinoctial cross — f— the 

symbol of the cycle-year measured 
by the equinoxes and solstices, 
xxxvii., xl., 222, 270, 271, 324, 325, 
548, 566, 571 
Geryon, the Phoenician Charion, 
the three-headed star-<jod Orion of 



Index 



657 



the year of three seasons, 266, 420, 
442, 518 

Ghati - kara, the maker of Ghatis, 
Dravidian measures of time, 104, 
469, 471 

Gilgamcs, Akkadian year-god, 73, 102 

Girdle, the circular year-waistband of 
the age of Pole Star worship, pre- 
ceding the sacrificial cord worn on 
the right and left shoulders of the 
worshippers of the Zodiacal sun-god. 
45, 82, 123, 135, 136, 233, 257, 631 

Girsit, Akkadian city, 56, 83, 120, 122, 
321, 495 

Gnatikas, the Jain sons of the fire- 
goddess Gna, the Greek yvvft, the 
Goidelic Cven our queen, 363 

Gnomon-stone, xxxv.-, xl., 29, 109, 272 

Goat Pole Star god, xxiv.,85, 121, 140, 
141, 142, 175, 598, 624 

Goat-skin dresses of Akkadian priests 
and Hindu Vaishya, 141, 439 

Goats, sacrifice of to the gods of the 
Pole Star Age preceding that of the 
sun-ram and wether, 108, 318, 322, 
434. 438, 495. 496, 5°3, 5°4, 607 

Gog and Magog, 354, 355, 356, 417, 
606 

Goidelic Celts, 201, 273, 288, 363, 386 

Gonds, a mixed race formerly ruling 
Northern and Central India, called 
Gaudia or Gondwana, 13, 14, 15, 16, 
108, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 
168, 176, 182, 193, 194 

Goose-goddess of Greece and Egypt, 
I 5 I > 37 2 ' 373- S ee Ericyna, Kansa 

Gorails, boundary wardens, priests of 
Goraya, 16 

Goraya, Gond boundary god, 16, 188, 
197, 308 

Goths, Gcta>, 121, 124, 273, 384, 386 

Grani, grey cloud-horse of Sigurd, 296, 

35 2 
Groves, sacred, 14, 15, 23, 29, 34, 49, 

56, 303. See Sarna, Vanaspati 
Guanches, natives of the Canary Is- 

lands, 87 
Gubbio, once the capital of the Umbrian 

races, 542 
Cud- la, the bull (gud) la, 83, 120 
Gudita, Akkadian city of the Dead, 

Gitga, Gliazi Miyan, and the Five Pirs, 

353. 354, 355. 356 
Guilds of traders in Asia, Europe and 
Mexico, xxxv., 352, 362, 368, 383. 

504. 5Si, 573. 575. 612 
Gumi Gosain, the central pole-god sup- 
porting the house, 10S, 127, 302 

U 



Gutium, land of the bull (gut), early 
name of Assyria, 84, 120, 124 

Gwalch-mei, the Hawk of May (Ga- 
warn), 73, 202, 336 

Gwenhwyvar {Guinevere), 72, 539 

Giuydion, 2S3, 284, 285 

Hadad, the pomegranate sun-god, 52, 

58, 231 
H adding, 185 
Haetumant or Helmend, mother-river of 

the Kushika, 51, 79 
Hai, Hi, Egyptian ape-god preceding 

the ape and goose-god Bes, 150, 151, 

373 

Haihayas, Haiobunsi, sons of Hai, 
Indian ruling race governing all 
North India before the Gonds and 
Kushika Kaurs; they were destroyed 
by Parasu-Rama, the god of the 
double-axe (parasu), xlv., 151, 194, 
196, 199, 261, 287, 295 

Ihenir, sun-horse of the Edda brought 
to the North from Asia Minor, 146 

Hair, ceremonial culture of, by the 
barber-priests of the age of the 
eleven-months year, and its subse- 
quent total tonsure except the scalp - 
lock, xxi., 326, 328-347, 354, 469, 
481 

Hairy races, no, 116, 120, 121 

Hajams, barber marriage-priests and 
surgeons, 342, 343 

Hainan or Baal Khamman, 246, 303, 

355 

Hammer-cross of St. Anthony and 
Thor, 151. 152 

Hand, sign of the god of the year of 
five-day weeks, xiv. , 17, 65, 380. 
See Daksha 

Hani/a Beni, the sons of the Righteous, 
the tribe of Abram, their sacrament 
on dates and curds as sons of the 
date-palm and cow, and their tem- 
perate avoidance of intoxicating 
drinks, 523, 524, 5S3 

Hanuman, the striker (kanu), the year- 
ape-god son of Pavana the wind, and 
brother of Su-griva the bird-headed 
Pole Star ape ('which see), 36, 40, 82, 
119, 165 

Haoma, the Zend Soma, 25, 182, 299, 
321 

Uafi, the Egyptian ape-god, 38, 39, 
44. 75- 76, i5 r . 534- See Kapi 

Ilafto-iringas, the seven bulls, Zend 
name of the Great Bear Septem- 
triones, xlv., 124 

Ha ah-vaiti, the river on which Herat 



65S 



Index. 



stands, the original Sarasvati, 170, 

187, 587 

Haran or Kharran, the road, the city 
of Laban, the white god (which see), 
252, 253, 383, 402, 405 

Hari, the son of the goddess Shar, a 
name of Krishna, 184, 211, 383, 588 

Flaris, a caste of scavengers, 67 

Harmonia, Kharmano, Kharman, the 
snake-wife of Kadmus,xx.,xxi.,xxiv. , 
xxviii. , 627 

Harpies, the three devouring seasons 
of the year, 305 

Hasain, Hosain, the Mahommedan 
twins, 432, 433 

Hasta, the hand constellation Corvus 
ruling the West, the guardian star of 
the Pandavas, 426, 485 

Hastinapur, city of Hasta, the capital 
of the Bharatas, 485, 486 

Hat-hor, the house (hat) of Hor, the 
Pole Star mother of Horus in his 
first avatar as the bird-headed ape 
ruling the year, 39, 75, 276, 378, 
531, 532 (the seven Hat-hors, stars 
of the Great Bear), 535 

Havilah, son of Joktan, the valley of 
the Indus in India, 52, 138, 593 

Haya-griva, the horse (liaya) necked 
or headed (griva) god of the Budd- 
hists, 334, 337, 353 

Heavens, the four, the four historical 
ages of Buddhist history, 298,463,473 

Hebe, the female form, of Ganymede, 
wife of Herakles, 145 

Hector, 265, 330, 491, 511 

Heifer, offering of by the Jews and to 
female goddesses, its meaning, 411, 
546, 547 

Hekate, the mother of a hundred 
(eK-aro'c), the witch-mother, the con- 
stellation Ma or Argo, the Zend 
Sata-vaesa of the hundred creators, 
184, 186, 310 

Helene, the tree-mother-goddess, twin 
sister of Poludeukes the much (pohc) 
raining (deukes) god, xli., 508 

Hephaistos, the Sanskrit yavishtha, the 
most binding (yu), the lame one- 
legged god of the fire-drill of the 
revolving heaven, 28, 58, 148, 149, 
514- 515 

Herakles, the Phoenician Archal, 102, 
145, 186, 229, 232, 235, 266, 369, 
395- 575- See Archal, Melquarth 

Heratles, the Latin god of fenced boun- 
daries (epKos), 163, 441, 442, 443, 
444, 445 

Here, the moon-mistress ruler of the 



star peacocks, wedded to Zeus in 
Gamelion (January — February), 281, 
375,398,429,451,519,575 
Hermes, the god of the gnomon-pillar 
(ipua), the ram and calf-bearer as 
Kriophoros and Moskophoros, 160, 
278, 279, 281, 300, 339, 354, 512, 

514.515 

Heme the hunter, a form of the deer- 
sun-god Cernunnos, 88 

Hestia, the Greek goddess of the house- 
hold fire, the Latin Vesta, 58 

High places in plain countries, artificial 
hills of Shem-i-ramot, 232 235, 236 

Hi-isi, the Finn wooded mother-moun- 
tain, 279 

Himyarites, the black Dravidian and 
Sabfean race of Southern Arabia 
54,80 

Hippodameia, 306, 515, 516, 517, 518 

Hippolyte, 339, 340, 491, 515 

Hippolytus, son of Theseus, the chariot- 
eer of the year-star Auriga (which 
see), xlv., 338, 339, 340 

Hiranya-garbha, the sun of the Golden 
Womb, 497, 498 

Hiranyahasta, the sun-god of the 
Golden Hand, 497, 624 

Hir-men-sol, great stone of the sun, 
the centre stone of the sun-circles 
and the earlier solitary Men-hirs, 
106, 379, 519 

Hittites, the Khati or joined race of 
India, Assyria, and South-western 
Asia, the Indian rulers of Khatiawar, 
sons of the goat and antelope, xxxiv., 
140, 214, 217, 259, 348, 362, 581, 

587. 594, 595 

Hobal, Arabian god bearing seven 
arrows in his hand, the leader of the 
360 year-gods, 433, 434 

Ho-kols, 16, 440 

Ho-Mwidas, 146 

Horse-god, the black horse of night, 
the god of the horse's head of the 
eleven-months year succeeding the 
sun-ass and the white horse of the 
sun of day of solar worship, xxiii. , 
xxiv.,' xxxiv. , xxxvii., 141, 202, 294, 
295. 304, 314, 315. 3l8, 327, 329, 
330, 357, 4§5> 486, 496, 502, 503, 
538, 554. 576, 577- . See Pegasus 

Hor-shesu, the primitive people of 
Egypt, 40, 340 

Horns, first, the bird-headed ape, son 
of Hat-hor the Pole Star; after- 
wards, the son of Isis, the goddess of 
the Sekhet constellation Scorpio, the 
god born at the autumnal equinox, 



Index. 



659 



and the Jackal-god Anubis of the 
thirteen-months year, 39, 75. 2 7&> 
277. 377, 378. 53L 533, 534, 535 . 

Hoshca, the Yah of the Has who with 
Caleb the dog (kalb), the dog- star 
Sirius, took Jericho, the moon city, 
and established the solar worship of 
the fifteen-months year, 376, 378,379. 
See Caleb 

Hotar, Holri, the priest who pours {hu) 
libations and utters the invocations 
to the gods, the speaking-priest, 216, 
228, 298, 299, 300, 610 

Hottentots, 114 

Houses, house-building, 156. See Dame 

Hu, Zend form of the mother-bird Khu, 
182, 232, 274, 376, 533 

Hu-kairya, the creating (kairya) Hu, 
the creating cloud-bird of the mother- 
river Euphrates, 125, 214, 235, 246 

Huli, spring festival of the red race, 
the successors of the sons of the 
almond-tree Kurum, 187, 450, 451, 

474 

Husham, the Hebrew form of the Zend 
Hu-shrava, the glory of the Hus and 
conqueror of the heathen, the king 
of the Temanites of Southern Arabia, 
230 

Husliim, the Hu or bird-sons of Dan 
the Pole Star god, also called Shu- 
ham, 230, 376 

Hu-shrava, the Zend conqueror, glory 
of the Hus, the Su-shravas of the 
Rigveda, 182, 230 

Ilvogvi, the coming Shu, the bird- 
mother-wife of Zarathustra, 262 

Hyades, 398 

Hydra constellation, 367, 374 

la, la-khan la, the fish-son of the 
house (/) of the waters (a), Akkadian 
fish-god issuing from the constella- 
tion Ma Argo, 19, 24, 29, 71, 73, 
410, 413 

Iakkhos, the Greek form of the Vedic 
Yakshu, the Akkadian la-khan la, 
the fish, the son of the Hebrew Jok- 
shan, 592 

Iberians, the Basque Ibai-erri or people 
(<?;-;-/) of the rivers (ibai), xxxiii., 129, 
136, 138, 140, 203, 354, 355 

Ida, Ha, Ira, the mother-goddess of 
the sons of Manu the measurer, first, 
the little fish, the eel, which be- 
came the dolphin, the horned-fish ; 
secondly, the sheep-mother of the 
sun-sheep (Eda) ; and thirdly, the 
mountain-mother of the sons of the 



cow, the goddess of the central navel- 
altar of the nation, the mother of the 
Iranian race and the Indian Iravati, 
xxxiii., 124, 176,205, 225, 228, 300, 
404 

Idah, the goddess-mothers of the rainy 
season in the Apr! hymns, 299 

Id-khu, the constellation Aquila, 367, 

373 

Iguvium, 542. See Gubbio 

Ikshvdku, the sons of the sugar-cane 
(iksha), an Indian dynasty, 8, 167, 
270, 358 

Ila-putra, the snake-son of the eel- 
mother Ha, 176 

Il-Il-ja, the eel, Finnish name for God, 
126 

Ilos, Ilu, Assyrian god and first king 
of the Trojan Dardanians, 31, 143, 
144, 411, 509 

Indra, the eel-god (Indu Aind) of the 
Indian sons of the rivers, who be- 
came in the Rigveda the buffalo- 
rain-god, son of Vyansa or Vyasa, 
the alligator constellation Draco and 
the mother-tree out of whose side he 
was born. He succeeded Gautuma, 
the father of the bull race, as hus- 
band of Ahalya, the sun-hen, and 
was the yoke-fellow of Kutsa, the 
moon {kit) god of the Purus, who 
was his charioteer. He was the 
god of the sons of the sun-dog, the 
dog-star Sirius who succeeded the 
sons of his father Vyasa, jthe alligator 
or snake constellation Draco. He 
beguiled Kama, the horned-sun-god 
of the cycle-year, of his golden im- 
impenetrable armour, the panoply 
of Perseus, Sigurd and Achilles ; 
and found the head of Dadhiank, 
the sun-horse of the eleven-months 
year, in Sharya-navan, the ship 
(iiavdii) of the year-arrow (sharya), 
in the plain of Tan-eshur, sacred to 
the god Tan. He slew the Vritra 
or circling-snake of the early Pole 
Star Age, and killed Ahi-shuva, the 
swelling-snake, the Ahi-budhnya, 
the snake of the depths, the Greek 
god Python, with the help of the 
seven Maruts, the seven stars of the 
Great Bear; and finally introduced 
the pure Soma unmixed with intoxi- 
cating drink as the national sacra- 
mental drink, the Tri-ashira or three 
mixings of Indra, 31, 69, 70, 100, 
101, 127, 132, 146, 180, 184, 212, 
213, 216, 295, 314, 321, 322, 332, 



U ll 2 



66o 



Index. 



349, 35°, 352, 366, 399, 431, 501, 

5°9 

Indrajit, the god of the third year of 
the cycle of Ravana, the ten-headed- 
god, slain by Lakshman and Rama, 
237, 238 

Indu Aind, the eel, root of Indra, 127, 
128 

Ingino, Ing, Ingcevones, sons of the 
household-fire, 542, 543, 546, 548, 

554 

Ino, the bird-mother of the sun-god 
Melicertes, Melquarth, who became 
the dolphin-mother and the possessor 
of the zodiacal ribbon, the Kredem- 
non, 397, 512, 627, 628, 629, 630, 
631, 642 

lolans, Baal Iol, charioteer of Herakles, 
263 

lonians, 31 

Iran, Iranians, 155, 225 

Iravata, Iravati, sons of Ira and the 
rivers consecrated to her, xxxiii., 176 

Ishdna, the supreme Lord (is/i), the 
elephant-rain-god Gan-isha, the equi- 
valent of the Buddha, the eighth of 
the successive forms of Prajapati, 
the supreme god Orion and begetter 
of the ninth, the boy Kumara the 
perfect sun-god, equivalent of Ra- 
hulo the little Rahu, son of the 
Buddha, 498 

I-shara, the house of Shar the corn- 
mother, 138 

Isis, xxviii.,,45, 231, 377, 531, 545 

Is-tar, 50, 56, 100, 188, 233 

I-tanos, Zeus, as the god Tan, the mud, 
of whom he and the Itonian Athene 
are duplicate forms, 29, 33, 258, 263 

Ixion, the Greek form of the Sanskrit 
Akshivan,the god of the axle (a/b/za), 
bound to the stars of the Great Bear, 
which he made to turn and thus 
measure the year, 134, 308, 423 

Iza-nagi, Iza-nami, the Japanese cre- 
ating-twins, 148 

Jachin, Hiphil form of Chiun, the 
pillar, 246, 379 

Jack=la. Khan la, the fish, 413, 420, 
421 

Jacob, the supplanter, the twin-brother 
of Esau or Usof, the Pole Star goat- 
god {which see), 304, 341, 377, 402, 
403, 404, 405, 407, 460, 527, 530 

Jains, the Hittite religious confeder- 
acy of Khatiawar, 316, 318, 319, 
358, 359, 428, 576 

Jaishtha, May — June, meaning the 



oldest, the mid-month of the year, 

147, 354 . 

Jamad-agni, the god of the twin-fires, 
son of Richika the fire-spark and the 
two mother-trees, the Banyan {Fiacs 
Indica) and the Pipal (Fiacs relig- 
iosa), father of Parasu-Rama, the 
god of the double-lunar-axe, the 
supreme god of the plant worship- 
pers, 261 

Jambu-dwipa, Central India, the 
land of the sons of Jamvavan, the 
bear-father of the sons of the Jamb- 
bu-tree who painted the bear Tilokha 
or totem mark on their foreheads, 

157, 158, 425, 465, 480 
Jambu-tree, Eugenia Jambolana, 119, 

158, 425, 465 

Janamejaya, he who is victorious {jaya) 
over birth (Janam), the sun-king of 
the worshippers of the never-dying 
sun of the eight-rayed star, his high 
priest Ashtaka who destroyed the 
Naga gods, 271, 423 

Jantu, the eldest son of King Somaka 
offered in sacrifice, 245 

Janus, the Latin god of the doors 
(janua) of time, 434, 435, 442, 443 

Jara-sandha, the union (sandha) by 
old age or lapse of time (jam), the 
god-king of Magadha born from the 
two halves of the mango, the mother- 
tree of the worshippers of the two 
lunar-crescents. Slain by Bhima 
and Krishna, the antelope-god, his 
successor, 195, 197, 234, 249 

Jarat-karu, Jarat-kama, makers of 
time (Jara), parents of Ashtaka, the 
sun-god of the eight-rayed star, 271, 
364, 365, 422 

Jasodd =Rohim, the star Aldebaran, 
mother of Vala-rama, the circling 
(vala) Rama whose weapon is the 
plough, the stars of the Great Bear, 

427 

Jason, the healer (ias), the pilot of the 
year-ship Argo, 305, 341, 407 

Jats, Indian Getas who superseded the 
matriarchal form of communal pro- 
perty by allotting it to families, 153, 

293> 385, 386, 387 

Jayadratha, the silver boar-god ruling 

the seventeen-months year, 526, 529 

Jei'icho, the yellow (yareh) moon city, 

378 
Jesse or Is/iai, he who is the supreme 
god, father of Dodo or David, the 
year-god of the eight-rayed star of 
the fifteen-months year, 406 



Index. 



66 1 



Jharas, the gold-washers of Chutia 
Nagpur, 358 

Jo-bab, the gate (bab) of God {yd), 230, 
299 

Joktan or Jokshan, brother of Peleg 
the stream and son of Eber or Abram, 
the father of thirteen sons, the thir- 
teen months of the year, and of the 
race who ruled the coasts of South- 
western Asia from Arabia to the 
land of the Mountain of East India, 

5i, 52, 53, 54, 593 

Jordan, Iardanus, the yellow (yareh) 
moon-river of the Minyans, the suc- 
cessor as parent-river of the Eu- 
phrates, 404 

Joseph, the interpreter (asipu) god, the 
eleventh son of Jacob and god of the 
eleventh-months year, 304, 341, 403, 

405, 53° 

Joshua, 376. See Hoshea 

Judah, the praised fourth son of Jacob 
and Leah the wild cow {Le), father 
of the twin sons of Tamar, the date- 
palm mother-tree, 137, 158 

Jugah-nath, the Lord of space (Jitgah), 
the temple at Puri where the god 
worshipped is the stem of the parent- 
tree, the log of wood called Vishnu 
the year-god, 31, 343, 545 

Jumna or Yamuna, the river of the 
twins (yam a), 131, 183, 191, 301 

Ka Who, mystic name of the year-god 
Prajapati (Orion), 204, 205 

Kabir, the wise ape (kapi), god of the 
Kabiri of Indian Kurmis and Koi- 
ris called Kabir-puntis and the Sikhs, 
151, 216, 352 

Kabiri, the believers in creation by 
' pairs, whose creed was that univer- 
sally distributed over India, South- 
western Asia and Europe by the sons 
of the antelope, xxiv. , 147, 148, 149, 
151, 221, 254 

Kabir-puntis, 216, 220 

Kadamba, the mother-almond-tree, a 
form of the tree-goddess Diupadl, 
526, 528 

Kadmus, the creating - god of the 
Boeotians or sons "of the ploughing- 
oxen of the East (kedem), brother of 
Europa the West (ereb) mother, and 
husband of Harmonia (which see), 
xx., xxi., 32, 138, 258, 512, 627 

Kadrk, the tree (dm) of Ka, the thir- 
teenth wife of Kashyapa, the Kushite 
father and mother of the Nagas, 
xxxix., 106,481, 517, 526, 530 



Kahtan, 53, sons of Joktan (which see) 
Kai-kaia, the mountain - mother of 
Bharata, wife of Dasa - ratha or 
Raghu the sun-god, and mother of 
the Gonds called Koi-tor, sons of 
the mountain, 180, 279 
Kakshisha, Akkadian name for Sirius, 

367, 373 

Kakshivau, Kakshivat, son of Dirgha- 
tamas, the long (dirgha) darkness of 
the cycle-year, and of Ushinari, sister 
of Shiva, and the ruling god of the 
eleven-monthsyear,2ii, 311,424, 503 

Kali, a form of the goddess Durga of 
the eleven-months year, 318, 320, 
360, 43° 

Kallisto, the female Great Bear god- 
dess, a name of Artemis, 138, 491 

Kahnashapdda, the Pole Star with the 
spotted (kalmasha) feet, the stars, 
311, 3J2, 313, 397, 446, 591 

Kamar-al-zaman, the moon of the age, 
the crescent-mate of Badar the full 
moon, 285, 286, 287 

Kamars, Bengal workers in metal, 357 

Kambhojas, 13, 251 

Kandhs, sons of the sword, the Ugur 
or lunar falchion of the Ugro-Finn 
races, and worshippers of Tari pennu, 
the Pole Star goddess, and the 
eleventh god of the eleven-months 
year, 36, 308, 317, 320,564 

Kang-desh, Kangra in the Punjab, 174 

Kansa, the moon - goose slain by 
Krishna, king of the Ugro-Finns, 
196, 316, 320, 362, 519, 529 

Kanthika, the horse of the Buddha 
which died at the end of his journey 
of thirty yojanas through the thirty 
stars, and was raised to heaven as 
the star-horse the constellation Pega- 
sus, 468, 469, 488 

Kanva, the new (kana) priests of the 
Yadu-Turvasu, the parent-priests of 
the Bharatas, sons of Sakuntala, 
the daughter of Vishvamitra and 
Menaka, the moon-god and goddess, 
280, 363, 584, 612 

Kaphtorim, the Philistines, sons of the 
ape Kapi, 38, 566 

Kapi, the Dravidian ape-god who be- 
came the Polar constellation Kepheus, 
37, 39, 44, 216, 352 

Kapila, the father-god of the yellow 
(kapila) race, 465 

Kapila-vastu, birth-place of the Budd- 
ha, 464, 465, 467 

Karambha, the barley - offering to 
Pushan, 348 



662 



Index. 



Karanas, Hindu year of, 41, 103, 179, 

197. 457, 609 

Kama, the horned sun-god, begotten 
by the father-sun from the navel of 
his mother Kunti, the lance, the 
fire-drill of the altar-fire, the god of 
the Angiras priesthood of the offerers 
of burnt offerings of the cycle-year 
of three years. He was launched as 
a babe in the Ashva, the ass or 
horse-river, became king of Anga, 
and was beguiled by Indra of his 
impenetrable golden armour before 
he became one of the Kauravya 
leaders of the eleven-months year, 
and was rejected by Drupadi, the 
bride of the Pandavas, though he 
strung the bow from which the arrow 
that won her was to be shot, 179, 
211, 212, 213, 233, 249, 296, 329, 
353, 426, 482, 526 

Karshipta, the hawk-form of Zara- 
thustra, 298 

Kasbhara, workers in bell-metal, 353, 
36i 

Kashava, the mother - lake of the 
Kushites, the sea Zarah in Seistan 
into which the Helmend flows, 51, 
173. 376 

Kashi {Benares), 91, 96, 176, 190, 604 

Kashyapa, the father of the Kushika 
or Kushites, xxxix., 26, 104, 334, 
344. 358, 470, 516 

Kassiopcea, 39, 209 

Kastor, the pole (stor) of Ka, the un- 
sexed beaver of the twins Gemini, 
221, 222, 253, 254, 508 

Kauravya, the Kaurs or Kurus of the 
Mahabharata, the egg-born sons of 
Gandhari the vulture-star Vega, and 
rulers of India from their Kuru- 
kshetra capital, xvii.,xxii.,29, 82, 97, 
104, 128, 178, 180, 191, 245, 249, 
25§> 3io, 374, 451, 484, 508, 509 

Kaurs, Kurus, xvii. , 193, 194, 195, 
^196, 197, 219, 596, 597 

Kavad, the father of the Kavi Kush 
kings, xxiii., 51, 376 

Kavi Kush, xxiii., 174, 182, 216 

Kayasth, the writer caste, 307 

Keftenu, Egyptian name of the Phoe- 
nician ape-gods, 38, 566 

Kepheus, constellation of the Pole Star 
of the ape Kapi from 21,000 to 
19,000 B.C., 37, 38, 39, 75, 76, 143, 
209, 260, 329, 397 

Keresaspa, the horned (/ceres) horse, 
Zend god, 213, 214 

Ktresavazda, he of the horned (keres) 



club, brother of the Turanian king 
Frangrasyan, the god of the trident 
Ytipa, the sacrificial stake of the 
Takkas, 173, 175, 182 

Kerubi, the flying bulls of Assyrian 
theology, the twins in Taurus, 197, 
600 

Kesari-tar, the daughter (tar) of the 
Kettle or Cauldron of Life, mother 
of the sun-lizard after three years' 
pregnancy, 266 

Keturah, the Eastern wife of Abram, 
the enclosing (katar) incense-mother, 
the Vedic Vritra, 253, 593 

Kewut, Kaivarta, the fisher-merchant 
kings of Tamra-lipti, 360 

Khadira-lree (Acacia Catechu), the 
tree-mother of fire of the Hindu 
ritual of animal sacrifices, of which 
were made both the Soma fire-socket 
and the eleven stakes to which the 
victims offered to the gods of the 
eleven-months year were tied, 561 

Khar-sak-kurra, the mother-mountain 
of the East in Akkadian and Ku- 
shika theology, xxii. , 51, 154 

Khartik, October — November, month 
sacred to the Krittakas or Pleiades, 
the first month of the Pleiades year, 
21,44, 197, 234, 316, 318, 322, 488, 

565 
Kharwars, the parent-tribe of the 

Chiroos, 108, 128, 193, 449, 450, 

526, 579 
Khati, the Hittites (which see) of India, 

xxxiv., 214, 217, 235, 345, 362, 387, 

444, 502, 594, 595 
Khatiawar, the Indian land of the 

Khati, 176, 252, 361, 584 
KJiepera, the Egyptian beetle, year of, 

532, 533, 574 
Kkerias, Kharias, 10S, 109, 128 
Khorasan, Khvaniras, 71, 500 
K/iu, the sacred mother-bird of the 
Akkadians and Egyptians and under 
dialectic forms of all the people of 
Southern Asia and maritime Europe, 
xv., xxiii., xxxviii., 25, 55, 63, 125, 
I5 6 . 175, 193, 271, 293, 388, 416, 
470, 612. See Bird-mother Hu Shu 
Kichaka, the hill-bamboo, 81, 192 
Kirke, the hawk-mother-goddess (xip- 

kos), 192, 549. See Circe 
Kohathites, the prophet-priests of the 
Jews, the wearers of the ephod, the 
symbol, under the name Aaron, 
the Chest or Breast, of the will of 
God revealed to the inspired priest- 
hood. They were the third of the 



Illdc.X. 



66 3 



Jewish priestly orders, their prede- 
cessors being the sons of Gershom 
and Merari ; the three answer to the 
Bhrigus, Angiras and Atharvans of 
Hindu theology, 297, 391, 405, 
528 
Koikopal, the cow-keepers, the ruling 
tribe of the eight tribes of Gonds, 
157, 176, 180, 200 
A'olamis, a tribe of Gonds, 108, 157 
Koliya, the Kol parent village of Maya 
or Magha, the Malli mother of the 
Buddha, 31, 464 
Kols, Kolarians, or Cholas, 13, 40, 

108. See Mundas, Mallis 
Kooc/i-Raj-bunsi, 583 
Korkus {Mundas), one of the Gond 

tribes, 108, 157 
Koronis, the raven or flower-mother of 
.Esculapius, the sister of Ixion, 134, 
136, 162, 308, 389 
Korwas, 12, 15, 128, 193 
Kosala, land of the Kushika, 16, 160, 

198 
Kototyul, sons of the log of wood, mane 
of the Marya or tree (marom) Gonds, 
108, 157 
Kouretes,Kurctcs, dancing-priests of the 

Pole Star god, xxv., 136 
Kredemnon, the zodiacal ribbon of Ino, 

513, 630, 631, 638 
Krodha, central month of the year of 
the thirteen wives of Kashyapa, 516, 
517, 522 
Krishanu, the drawer (karsh) of the 
bow of heaven, the rainbow-god, 95, 
98, 99, 102, 306, 321, 391, 426, 459, 
481, 568, 574 
Krishna, female form of Krishna, 475 
Krishna, meaning the black antelope, 
also called Vishnu, the ruling year- 
god of the sons of the antelope and 
of the Bharatas, the god who drives 
the year-chariot of the sun culmi- 
nating as a god of the fifteen-months 
year, the eighth son of Vasu-deva 
and DevakI, xxxix., 31, 135, 143, 
172, 189, 196, 237, 244, 278, 316, 
328, 329, 354, 373, 387, 427, 428, 
429, 430, 431, 432, 449, 485, 488, 
526, 527, 568, 577, 578, 634 
Krittakas, the Spinners, name of the 

Pleiades, xiii., 21, 322, 525 
Kronos, the god of the lunar-sickle, 

wiv., 204, 631 
Kshatrya, the warrior or archer master 
{ksJia) race of Finno-Bactrian origin, 
82, 101, 307, 551 
Kit, Kiilat, the moon of the Finns, the 



root of Kutsa (which see), 1S2, 521, 

525 

Kiunara, the boy, the ninth of the 
forms of the Supreme God Prajapati 
(Orion), the creating-god of the year 
of three seasons, begotten by Ishana 
(which see), the elephant-rain-god 
Gan-isha. This ninth sun- god was 
the god called Hiranya-garbha, he 
of the golden womb (garbha) born 
of the consecrated fire-pan on the 
Hindu Garhapatya fire-altar, the 
equivalent of Rahu-lo, the little 
Rahu, the son of the Buddha in 
Buddhist theology, 498, 564 

Kitmbha-karna, the maker of the year 
water-jars (kumbha), the god of the 
second year of Ravana's cycle, 237, 238 

Kumhars, Indian potters, 114, 308 

Kunti, the lance or fire-drill, the 
mother of Kama and the Pandavas, 
211, 249, 373 

Kunti-bhojas, the warrior sons of the 
lance, 355 

Kurmis, Kurumbas, the most skilled 
caste of Indian agriculturists, 17, 115, 
124, 132, 151, 167, 172, 195, 197, 
205, 219, 251, 348 

Kuru-Panchulas, 400, 401, 465, 579 

Kuru-kshcthra, the land (kshelra) of 
the Kurus or Kaurs, xvii., 26, 27, 
164, 170, 180, 196, 261, 295, 586, 
596 

Kurum (Nauclca parvifolia), the 
mother-almond-tree of the Ooraons, 
Chiroos and Kharwars, and its 
annual festival, 346, 449, 450, 528, 

.579 
Kitnim-nasa, the destruction (>iasa) of 

the Kurum almond-tree history of 

the name, 450, 528 
Kusambi, mother city of the Kushikas, 

.156, 355 
huslia grass (poa cynosuroides), the 

parent-grass of the Kushika sons of 

the antelope, 7, 8, 159, 1S8, 191, 

226, 227, 239, 301, 306, 322, 323, 

345, 346, 473, 474, 483, 5°5, 603, 
606 

Kushika. or Kushites, sons of the 
Kusha grass of Kush the tortoise, 
also of Kaus the bow, the warrior 
conquerors of the antelope race, 
xviii., xxii., 7, 8, 9, 16, 29, 51, 86, 
118, 121, 15S, 159, 161, 168, 173, 
190, 198, 203, 210, 226, 238, 280, 
.390, 429 

Kush-aloya, the house or mother (aloya) 
of the Kushika mother of Kama, 



664 



Index. 



wife of the sun-god Raghu, xl., 50, 

237, 279 

Kutsa, the moon (ku) god of the 
Nahusha or Naga Purus, charioteer 
of Indra, 180, 181, 182, 218 

Laban, the white god of Assyria, builder 
of the brick foundations of heaven, 
the moon-god of Haran, 252, 402 

Labraid Lore, 202 

Laertes, the Lar or Lath father of 
Odusseus, 459, 460, 461 

Lakhmu, Lakhdmu, the Akkadian 
creating pair, 154, 407 

Lakshmun, son of Raghu, the boun- 
dary (laksh) guardian, the watcher 
of the star-track of Rama, xvii., 208, 

238, 279, 340, 442, 453, 454 
Lamb, sacrifice of as a substitute for 

the eldest son, 224, 232, 547, 548 
Lantech Langa, an Akkadian and 

Hebrew god, the equivalent of the 

Gond Lingal, 154, 403 
Langa-vira, a clan of the Yaudheyas of 

the Punjab, men of the Linga, 215 
Lapitka,$o$, 515, 517, 518 
Lar, Lares, 265, 461 
Larissa, Pelasgian capital of the Lar, 

265 
Lat, Indian sacred wooden pillar, 461 
Latinus, 461 

Latona, L.eto, the goddess of the tree- 
trunk, 148, 247, 438, 452, 544 
Leah, the wild cow (Le),wik of Jacob, 

daughter of Laban, 377, 402 
Leda, the incense (Ledon) mother of 

the Twin-gods, the stars Gemini, 

253. 374 
Leo constellation, 373, 376 
Liban, the sea-born [mulr-gen) sun- 
goddess of the South, wife of Labraid 

Lore, 202 
Licchavi, sons of the Akkadian dog 

(Lig) belonging to the Vajjian or 

tiger race, 161, 304, 362 
Likbarra, the Akkadian tiger or striped 

dog constellation Pegasus, 331, 332 
Linga, altar of India and Britany, xxix. , 

269—273, 591, 594 
Lingal, father-god of the Gonds, xxix. , 

100, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 

161, 403 
Llyr, Celtic-god of the sea ruling the 

year, and father of Bran, the raven, 

63, 448 
Lohar, originally copper now iron- 
smiths in India, 128, 172, 352 
Loka-palas, the wardens of space, 

(loka), 27, 104, 434, 456, 481 



Lokamprini, bricks indicating the Mo- 
hurtas, or Indian hours of the year, 
103, 609, 610 

Lolos, 2l Chinese race ruled by Queens, 
119, 120 

Lot, the Hebrew god of incense, 252 

Lotus, orginally consecrated as a divine 
symbol in India, 158, 190, 496 

Lucaria, mid-year festival of the grove 
(lucar) goddesses of the Luceres, 435 

Lug, Celtic god of light, son of the 
wolf, born in the tower of the three- 
years cycle, 282, 283, 284, 448, 449, 
451, 452, 641 

Lugaid, year-god of the fifteen-months 
year of the eight-days week of the 
eight Maine, slayer of Cu-chulainn, 
the sun-god of the left thigh of the . 
eleven-months year, 407, 408 

Lzimasi, the seven historical stars of 
Akkadian astronomy, 85, 367 

Luz, the shrine of the Hebrew parent- 
almond - tree, called Beth - el, the 
house of God, 405 

Lycaon, Arcadian wolf-god, who sacri- 
ficed his eldest son, 248. 

Ma, Akkadian mother-ship Argo, xv., 

30, 76 
Ma'at, the Egyptian goddess of justice, 

the Vulture, Pole Star Vega, xl., 

107, 368, 533 
Mabug, Hierapolis or Carchemish, 

Hittite capital on the Euphrates, 

230, 231 
Madhava, a name of Krishna, the god 

of Madhu, intoxicating drink made 

of the flowers of the Mahua tree, 171 
Madhu, mead made of the flowers of 

the Mahua-tree, 171, 568 
Madhu-graha, the Madhu-cup given to 

the Vaishyas and Kshatriyas at the 

Vajapeya sacrifice and repurchased 

by the Neshtri, 503 
Madhu-parka, an Indian ceremonial 

drink, made of Madhu and honey, 

171 
Madhu-vira, a clan of the Yaudheyas, 

of the Punjab, the men of Madhu, 

2I 5 

Madri, the intoxicated (mad) mother- 
goddess of Madhu, wife of Pandu, 
178, 428, 576 

Madrikas, subjects of Shalya, father of 
Madri, 178, 179 

Mag a, Maga-sebek, Mugger, Mugral, 
the Alligator of the Gonds and 
Egyptians, 100, 177, 178 

Magana, Al Makah, Akkadian and 



Index, 



665 



Arabic names of Sinai, the moon 
(sin) mountain and its god, 79, So, 
250 

Magh (January — February), the month 
sacred to Magha beginning the year 
of the Mundas, Ooraons, Santals, 
Bhishma, Lug, the Chinese and that 
of the Mahosadha birth of the Bud- 
dha as the sun-physician, 187, 395, 
398, 399, 401, 419. 426, 436, 437, 
450,451, 465, 473,486, 488 

Magha, Maya, reputed mother of the 
Buddha, the goddess of the Mallis or 
Mundas, 31, 332, 463, 464, 468, 627 

Maghada, land of the Maghas or 
Mughs, sons of the alligator, 57, 
x 53> 1S7, 188, 190, 192, 195, 199 

Mah-osadha. birth of the Buddha, son 
of Magha, 463, 464, 488, 537 

Mahto, the village guardian and ac- 
countant of the Ooraons, 2S8, 289, 

343 

Mahna-trec, yielding the madhu or 
honey drink of the Hindas, one of 
the three mother Tri-kadru-ka-trees, 
and the marriage-tree of the Bagdis, 
Bauris, Lohars, Kurmis, Mundas, 
and Santals, 167, 171, 172, 356, 
470 

Afame, the seven and eight Celtic time 
goddesses, the seven stars of the 
Great Bear, and the eight - days 
week of the fifteen-months year, 40S, 

454, 455, 489 

Makara, Tamil Makaram, Akkadian 
Makkhar, the porpoise or dolphin- 
god, successor of Maga or Muggar, 
the Alligator, and the fish of the 
tail of the constellation Capricornus 
with a goat's head, 177, 278 

Malay, the mountain {mal) race of 
Southern India, Malacca, and the 
Indian Achipelago, 174, 342, 346, 

35°, 36i, 536, 57o 

Mails, Mal Paharias of Anga, South 
Behar, the Finn-Dravidian mountain- 
race, 10S, 109, 121, 302, 536 

Mallis, mountain (mal) races of India, 
13, 40, 82, 160, 182, 215, 280, 304, 

342, 363, 387, 464, 465, 57o 

Ma mnr ins, male form of Anna Perenna, 
counterpart of Ninus or Nimrod, 
239, 240, 241 

Manasa, the female Manu, 356, 357 

Mauavi, 588 

Mandaite Sabrcans, 405, 548 

Mandara, the. revolving (mand) moun- 
tain of the Kushika, the hill Paris- 
nath, lord (nath) of the traders {Paris 



Panris) on the Barrakur in Chutia 
Nagpur, xxiii., 198, 212, 238 

Mango, mother-tree of the Kaurs and 
Kurmis, preceding the date-palm of 
Bhishma, one of the three Tri-kadru- 
ka parent-trees, and that of Jara- 
sandha, the god born of the two 
halves of the mango fruit, and grand- 
son of Vasu, the Kushika god of 
Mandara, 167, 195 

Manjhns, the share of land assigned to 
Ooraon kings in every village, 289, 

290, 343 
Manki, the chief of a Munda Parha or 

province, 15, 467 
Mann, the measurer of the Minyan 

race, 176, 205, 228, 291, 513, 565, 

588 
Mara, meaning of the, in Buddhist 

theology, 474, 475, 47S, 486 
March ab Mcirchion, the Brythonic 

horse (march) god with asses ears, 

201, 202 
Marduk, Bel Merodach, the year-calf, 

the conquering god Mordecai of the 

Purim festival, 25, 204, 303, 347, 

451 

Margaliya altar of the antelope (mnga) 
god, 611 

Marga-sirsha, Mriga-sirsha, Novem- 
ber — December, month of the deer's 
(mriga) head, 89, 428, 430, 565 

Mari-amma,ih.e Dravidian Uee(marom) 
mother (amma), the Hebrew Miriam, 
the Greek Mariam, who became the 
star Virgo, the mother of corn watch- 
ing over the reed-cradle of the sun- 
god, the stars Su-gi of the Wain, 
the Great Bear, that of Moses or 
Masu, the star Regulus in Leo (see 
Lumasi). She was the first goddess- 
mother of the Dravidians, the only 
Indian god whose image is always 
made of wood, 31, 133, 452, 510 

Marichi, the spark of light, a tree 
(marom) parent-god of the Pole Star 
Age who became one of the stars in 
the Great Bear, 119, 149, 334, 463 

Maroti, the tree (marom) ape-god of 
the Gonds, father of Bhima the Gond 
Bhim-sen, the Pandava god of Sum- 
mer, xl., 16, 35, 82, 165, 197,461, 
482, 508, 546, 547, 613. See Mars, 
Ma ruts 

Marriage customs, 107, 108, 121, 122, 
129, 172, 1S6, 343 

Mars, Martins, Etruscan Maso, the 
Roman form of the Indian Maroti, 
xxxix., 189, 255, 339, 461, 546, 547 



666 



Index. 



Martu, Akkadian South-west wind, 
xxxix., 335, 339, 546 

Marnts, the tree (maroni) and wind- 
goddesses of the Rigveda, xxxix., 
185, 431, 501, 503, 504, 611, 
612 

Marut-vatiya, the winter cup of the 
year of five seasons, 5°°? 5 01 

Marya or tree (marom) Gonds, the 
early Dravidian founders of villages, 
10, 13, 14, 16, 193, 194 

Marzawan, warden of the boundaries, 
the constellation Argo, 286, 287 

Masons, Free Masons, 551, 552 

Massa Getce, the greater {massd) Getas, 
121, 168, 518 

Matar-i-svan, the fire-mother of the 
dog (svan), 161, 363,' 438 

Mathura, the city of the twirling 
(math) god of the fire-drill, 131, 211, 
237, 427, 428, 590, 616 

Matriarchal primitive village commu- 
nities and their customs, 1 — 17, 

129, 337 
Matsya, the sons of the eel-fish -god, 

the ancestors of the Hindu royal 

races, 13 1, 178, 180, 1 91, 484, 576, 

592 
Maurya or peacock kings, 281, 519 
May festival of the Pleiades year, 49 
Mayas of Mexico and their year, xxxv., 

563, 566 

May-day and its antiquity as a national 
feast-day, 49, 62, 163, 164, 470 

May-pole of the Pleiades year, 49, 62 

Mayura, the peacock totem of the 
Bharatas, 281, 360, 362 

Mead, the sacred honey drink of the 
North consecrated to the dwarf-gods 
of the Finn races, who in Europe, 
Asia and America looked on the 
world as a beehive peopled by work- 
ing bees or ants, the Myrmidons of 
Achilles (p. 28), superintended by 
the prophet and queen bees, the priests 
and priestesses of Rai or Raghu, the 
sun-god, inspired by the holy mead ; 
the races whose gods and votaries 
drank Madhu in India, 168, 171, 
178, 179, 187, 188, 568 

Medb or Meave, the wizard queen of the 
Celtic West, mother of the Seven 
Maine, the seven stars of the Great 
Bear, wife of Aillil, the dwarf-god 
who tried to get the eighth bull of 
the fifteen-months year from Cu- 
chulainn, the sun-god of the eleven- 
months year, 488 — 490 

Medea, 341 



Mediterranean race, its special type 

of SCUII, II, 12 

Medrod, Modred or Melwas, the winter- 
archer-god of the Arthusian Legend, 
the counterpart of the Vedic Krish- 
anu, 72, 73, 539 

Meh-urt cow, the vulture-weaving-god- 
dess, the star Vega, the midwife of 
Khepera the beetle, 377, 532, 533 

Melanthius, goat-herd-god of the Odys- 
sey, 460 

Melicertes, Melqnarth, the master 
(malik) of cities (karth), the Celto- 
Phcenician sun-god of the Celtic city 
(Caer), the equivalent of Archal the 
son of Ino (which see), 244, 263, 397, 
446, 447, 452, 512, 629, 638, 640 

Melissai, the bee-priestesses of the 
mead-drinking age, 171. See Bee, 
Mead 

Mena-ka, the time-measuring (men) 
moon-goddess, mother of Sakuntala, 
279, 280, 524 

Mendh Ishwara, the ram-god of boun- 
daries, the god Daksha, father of 
the twenty-seven Nakshatra or 
Zodiacal stars of the cycle-year of 
the Ram-sun, 278 

Menelaus as a year-god of the year of 
five seasons, 508, 510 

Menhirs, sun gnomon-stones of the 
Palaeolithic Age preceding the sun- 
circles, 106, 107, 108, 273 

Merione, son of the Thigh (ixripia), as a 
year-god of the year of five seasons, 
508, 510 

Meru, central world-mountain of Hindu 
theology, xxii., 238 

Metres of the Vedic hymns, reminis- 
cences and memorial records of the 
successive year-reckonings of the 
theological history, 66, 67, 389, 392, 

394> 493, 495- 608 
Miao T'sti, cat tribes of China, 119, 

161 
Midas, generic name of the kings of 

Phrygia of the age of the worship of 

the sun-ass, 201, 203, 264 
Midir, Celtic god of the nether world 

¥ of the winter-sun, the equivalent of 

Medrod, 202, 203, 407 
Milesia?is, sons of Mile or Bile, the 

mother-tree shadowing the holy well 

of the sun-god, 130, 277, 305 
Min, the mother-goddess of the Minyan 

race, the star Virgo, mother of corn, 

xxiv., xxxv., 190, 259, 316, 317, 

325 
Minerva, Mena, Menfra, the Latin and ' 



Index. 



667 



Etrurian form of the measuring-god- 
dess Min, 259, 325 

Minos, Minyan king of Crete, 254, 255 

Minotaur, the bull of Minos, the con- 
stellation Taurus with its queen-star 
Aldebaran ruling the year of Minos, 
that of the god of the Double Axe 
measured by the revolutions of the 
Great Bear, xliii., xliv., 339 

Minyans, xxiv., xxxv., 203, 216, 229, 
255> 2 56, 259, 316, 404 

Mithuna, male and female twins of the 
Hindu zodiac, 147, 435, 625 

Mitra, one of the six Aditya or six 
days of the week, 186, 419, 503 

Mitra- Varuna, parent-gods of Vashish- 
tha, the god of the altar-flame, who 
were refused as parents by Ida when 
she became the cow-mother of the 
cycle - year of intoxicating drink ; 
they were the gods of the preceding 
age of milk libations, that of the 
Todas, for to them only pure Soma, 
the sap of the mother-tree and milk, 
are offered at the annual Soma sacri- 
fice, 42, 205, 577 

Moab, father of waters {mo), one of the 
twin sons of Lot, the Hebrew in- 
cense-god, the equivalent of the 
Greek Polu-deukes, the much-raining 
(deukes) god, 253, 254 

Mohurtas, the hours of the Indian duo- 
decimal system of time reckoning, 
103, 609, 610 

Moloch, the master (mali/c), the un- 
sexed fire and sun-god Herakles, to 
whom eldest sons were sacrificed, 232 

Moon, the year-measurer in the age of 
the first earth-altar made in the form 
of a woman, that of the Kushika 
worshippers of the Prastara or magic 
rain-wand of Kusha grass when New 
and Full Moon sacrifices were pre- 
scribed, that of the age of the wor- 
ship of High Places, the Hills of 
Shem-i-ramot and bisexual and sex- 
less gods. At first the sacrifice 
beginning the year or the season was 
the New Moon sacrifice, but the Full 
Moon sacrifice was made the initial 
sacrifice in the ritual subsequent to 
the fifteen-months year of Bhishma. 
The earliest moon-worshippers were 
the Northern races who worshipped 
the moon as a male god and the sun 
as the hen -goddess, but the Naga- 
Kushikas changed the sexes, and 
like the Mexicans, the Latin wor- 
shippers of Luna and the Greek 



worshippers of Here, Selene made 

the moon a goddess and the sun the 

male sun -lizard, the Greek Helios, 

the Latin Sol, 7, 8, 179, 233, 239, 

322, 326, 575, 591 
Morrigu, a Celtic sea (muir) goddess 

and her historical change of forms, 

489 
Moses, Masu, 367, 376 
Mossoos, the Chinese and Thibetan 

Mods, 330, 331, 333, 336, 337, 338, 

342, 353 
Mountain-mother, 56, 92, 356. See 

Cybele 
Mouse-god, 265, 266, 414. See Apollo 

Smintheus 
Mule-god, intermediate between the 

sun-ass and the sun-horse, 310, 370 
Multan, Malli-tana, the city of the 

Mallis. 215, 387, 588, 589, 591 
Munda, head man of the village, 15, 

288, 290 
Mundas, Mons, mountain-races, 5, 13, 

14, 15, 22, 28, 36, 40, 74,81, 82, 91, 

108, 109, 149, 160, 168, 193, 194, 

242, 338, 437, 449, 501 
Mundus Patet festival, 441, 448 
Muuja, sugar-cane grass, parent-grass 

of the Brahmins, 136, 423, 497, 602 
Murwa (Eleusine Coracana), and beer 

made from it, 2, 22, 178 
Mylitta, Babylonian goddess, 56, 232 
Myths, Mythic history, their reliability, 

ix., 13 

Ndbhd-nedishtha, the nearest (nedish- 
tha) to the navel, the central fire on 
the altar, 43, 137, 210, 22S 

Nagas, sons of the rain-snake (nag) 
and plough-god (nagur), xxxvi., 15, 
53, 161, 166, 1S1, 196, 229, 314, 

344. 353. 355. 359. 365, 49*. 520, 

521, 578, 584 
Nag-Panchami, festival of the five 

(pane A) Nags in Shravana (July — 

August), 318, 449, 454 
Nahash, the Naga king, 406, 422 
Nalior, Nahr, the channel, the Eu- 
phrates parent-river of the Semites, 

125, 140 
Nahuatl, Mexican Naga or snake race, 

r 563, 566, 575 
Nahusha, sons of the Nag, 69, 161, 

181, 406, 575 
Nairs of Southern India, a matriarchal 

race, 17, 229 
Nakshatra, Nag-kshethra, the field 

(kshclhra) stations of the Nags, the 

zodiacal stars showing the paths of 



668 



Index. 



the moon and sun through the 
heavens, xviii., 205, 208, 209, 237, 

278, 397, 593 
Nakula, the mungoose, the youngest 
Pandava, the winter-god, 527, 576, 

579 

Nala (the channel) and Damayanti, 
the earth it tames, story of, xxv., 9, 
10, 217, 218, 313, 469, 527 

Na-muchi, the antelope-god of drought 
who does not (na) release (inuchi) 
the rain, 321 

Nana, Akkadian fish-mother goddess, 
xix., 177, 209, 410 

Nanda, the bull-husband (Taurus) of 
Jasoda Rohini {Aldebaran), 427, 429, 
432, 464, 530 

Napit, a caste of priest-barbers, 344 

Naryo Sangha, Nardshamsa, the 
praised of men, the developed form 
of Nabha-nebhishtha as the per- 
petual fire on the altar, 42, 137. See 
Judah 

Navagva, the priests of the nine (iiavd) 
days week of the cycle-year, 210, 296 

Navigation, primitive in the Indian 
Ocean, 18 — 20 

Neanderthal or Cannstadt race, 88, 1 10, 

III, 112, II3, II5 

Nebt-hat, the house (hat) mistress 
(nebt), a form of Hat-hor (which see), 

t 75. 377 

Nemed, the grove (memeton nemus) 
parent of the Celtic races, 275 

Neolithic Age, xl., 79, 226, 272, 273, 
610 

Ner, Ner-gal, the great (gal) bright 
one, the Akkadian Pole Star goat, 
456 

Neshtri, the priest of Tvashtar, god of 
the year of two seasons of the Matri- 
archal Age, 501, 502, 504, 505 

A T estor, the guardian of the gates, 404, 
5°9, 5ii 

Nigrodha-tree (Ficns Indica), 26, 104, 
472, 478. See Banyan 

Nine, its sanctity as a historical num- 
ber, 210, 214, 246, 353, 356, 498, 
499. 597 

Nineteen, its historical meaning, 475, 
476, 477, 478 

Nin-lil, Akkadian goddess, 70 

Ninus or Nimrod, the hunter - star 
Orion, 84, 86, 236, 237, 240, 244 

Nishadhas, 91 

Nit or Ntith, the Egyptian Vulture 
weaving goddess of flax, 252, 253, 
533, 535 

Njord, the Edda-god of the North, 88 



Noah, 637 

Nooktas of British Columbia, 535, 
536 

Now-ut'set, Mexican buffalo goddess 
of the West, 565 

Nuada of the Silver Hand, Celtic year- 
god of the age when time was mea- 
sured by the crescent New Moons, 

277, 449 

Nun, Num., the fish-god of the eight 
creators of the fifteen - months year 
of Samoyede, Akkadian, Egyptian, 
and Hebrew theology, 377, 378 

Nunet, the Vulture wife of Nun, 377, 

378 

Nut-tree, the parent-tree of the Todas 
and Jews preceding the almond-tree, 
122. 461, 479. See Walnut 

Oak, a parent-tree of the Druids, 
Arcadians, Greeks, and Italian wor- 
shippers of the goat-god Pan, the 
god of the hairy Satyrs, xxi., 28, 
121, 135, 169, 369, 479, 509 

Odin, the god of knowledge (odj), 
170, 521 

Odusseus, the god of the road (cSSos), 
the path of the year, xiii., 144, 455, 
462, 512, 513, 630, 631, 632, 633, 
634,^.035 

Og, King of the Rephaim sons of 
Repha Canopus, 80, 144, 145, 354 

Oil, the holy oil of the sacred Sesame, 
xxxiv., 31, 162, 307, 308, 309 

Oil-press, or year-bed, 144 

Ojhas, men of knowledge (odj), or 
Pradhans Gond and provincial 
priests in Chutia Nagpur, 158, 170, 
290, 356 

Olive-tree of Athene, the parent-tree, 
the tree form of the sacred Sesame, 
31, 144,421, 5!3> 631 

O/nphale, the navel, wife of the un- 
sexed Herakles Sandon, and slave 
of the parent river Iardanus, Jordan, 
145, 232, 235, 395. See Nabha- 
nedishtha 

Onga,Onka, the heated Itonian Athene, 
the Southern goddess , 32, 353, 

357 
Ooraons, sons of the Malay Orang, 
meaning Man, the Dravido-Turanian 
ruling race of Chutia Nagpur, before 
the Kharwars, sons of the ass and 
the Kurum almond-tree, II, 268, 
288, 289, 290, 292, 344, 346, 360, 

449 
Ophir, son of Joktan, the gold land 
of India, 52, 138, 593 



Index. 



669 



Opiconsivia, a mid-year festival, 441, 448 
Orion, the hunting star of the Northern 
hunting races, sons of the deer-sun. 
It became the leading star which 
led the Pleiades and their attendant 
stars round the Pole, when the Rep- 
haim sons of the giant (rep ha) star 
Canopus reached lands in the north 
where Canopus, the former star 
leader, was invisible, xiii., 77, 87, 88, 
89, 90, 102, 144, 147, 167, 174, 179, 

283, 349, 354> 377, 39L.399. 401, 
602, 603. See Ninus, Praja-pati 

Orpheus, the Greek form of the Vedic 
Ribhus, 149, 313 

Orwandel, Orendel, the Orion of the 
North, xiii., 64 

Osiris, the Egyptian barley-god Orion, 
xlvi., 44, 45, 76, 151, 377, 531, 
533. 534 

Otits and Ephialtes, their year of thir- 
teen months, 514 

Owl, the Indian god Uluka of the Sa- 
rasvatis mother-bird of the incense 
Ethiopian merchants, of Athene and 
Minerva, the Minyan mother god- 
desses also of the Umbrians of Gub- 
bio, 257, 258, 543, 586 

Oxus or Jihun, the river of life (Ji), 
I54> 178, 591 

Padiun-uttara, the Northern (itttara) 
lotus (padumd), the thirteenth Bud- 
dha, god of the Ugro Altaic Finns 
who introduced into India the thir- 
teen - months year of the thirteen 
Buddhist Theris, 529, 530 

Pahan, village or parish priest of the 
Ooraons, 243, 288, 356, 567 

Paian, the healer epithet of the Phoe- 
nician eighth god Eshmun, and the 
Greek Apollo, 390, 430, 569 

Pajcipati, Ma/ia Gotami, the Buddhist 
female form of the male god Praja- 
pati (Orion). She was the leader 
and goddess of the first month of the 
thirteen-months year of the thirteen 
Theris, xxxvii., 468, 488, 522, 627, 
630 

Palaimon, Baal Yam, the sea-god, son 
of Ino, and the equivalent of Meli- 
certes, Melquarth, Portunus (which 
see), 446, 447, 448, 640 

Paldsha-tree (Butea frondosa), sacred 
tree of the Mundas, and the first most 
holy tree from which the creating 
Soma sap of the bird Su was ex- 
tracted as that ol the growing year of 
spring, also that of which the typical 



triangle, the Paradhis, representing 
the year of three seasons, was made 
and placed on the navel of the altar, 
made in the form of a woman, before 
it was superseded by the triangle of 
Pitu-daru wood (Pinus Deodara) 
of the offerers of animal sacrifices. 
The car of the Ashvins, the stars 
Gemini, was made of Palasha wood, 
95, 144, 228, 251, 271, 275, 301, 
391; 393, 395, 496, 574, 604, 606 

Palatine Salii, 239 

Palatine, hill of the god Pales, 438, 
440, 441 

Pales, Palca, the year-god of the grain 
husk (palea), 168, 324, 325. See 
Pallas 

Palici, the Italian twin creating gods, 
the cotyledon or husk leaves of the 
growing plant, 325 

Palilia, festival of Pales held on the 
2 1st of April, answering to St. 
George's Day of the 23rd April, 324, 

327 

Pallas, goddess of the Palladium, and 
mother-year-goddess of the grain 
husk (palea), 31, 324, 325 

Pallika, Procyon, the Akkadian star of 
the crossing dog, 73 

Palm-tree, date-palm mother-tree of 
the Hindu god Bhishma and Vala- 
rama of the fifteen months and of the 
Hebrew sons of Tamar and Judah 
(which see), 7, 17, 167, 425, 428 

Pan, goat - god of the hairy Satyrs, 
121, 141 

Panathenaia, mid-year feast of Athene 
as the tree-mother-goddess of the 
Peplos (which see), 34, 454, 573 
' Pancha-bila, offering to the five ruling- 
gods of space at the Dasha-peya 
sacrifice to the ten (dasha) gods of 
the ten lunar months of gestation, 
68, 400 

Panchalas, the men of the five (pancJi) 
claws (alas), the five days of the 
week, rulers of Northern India be- 
fore the Kurus, 41, 204, 401, 570, 
597. See Srinjayas 

Panchayats, village and state councils 
of five, 41, 387 

Pandavas, the five sons of Pandu and 
grandsons of Ambalika, the Great 
Bear mother (/. 9S), the conquering 
Bharatas of the Mahabharata, ruling 
the five seasons of the year, 97, 151, 
152, 178, 179, 195, 211, 213, 218, 
248, 249, 258, 279, 309, 327, 328, 
346, 348, 361, 367, 424, 425, 426, 



6yo 



Index. 



431, 470, 482, 483, 562, 576, 57S, 

579 

Pandu, the fair (pandu) and sexless 
sun-god, son of the Great Bear 
mother Ambalika and Vyasa, the 
constellation Draco, reputed father 
of the Pandavas, the representative 
of the Northern immigrant sons of 
the Bear, 98, 178 

Pandyas, the fair (pandu) race of the 
corn-growing sons of the North, sons 
of Agastya Canopus and successors 
of the Chiroo sons of the bird (ckir), 
40, 348 

Panis Paiiris, the traders of the Rig- 
veda, 210 

Papil-sak, Akkadian constellation Leo, 

367, 373 

Para-shara, the overhanging (para) 
cloud (shard), 312 

Parasu-Rama, of the Double Axe 
( parasu), son of Jamadagni, the twin 
(jama) fires and Renuka the flower 
pollen, the destroyer of the Hai- 
hayas, xliv., 260, 261, 295, 343 

Parka, a province of the Munda ma- 
triarchal state, 12, 15, 16, 17, 193 

Paridhis, sacred triangle first of 
Palasha and afterwards of Pitudaru 
wood placed on the navel of the 
altar, 228, 393. See Palasha. 

Parikshit, the circling sun of the sun- 
horse, son of Uttara, the Pole Star 
mother, and Abhimanyu, son of 
Arjuna and Su-bhadra, who became 
after his death the moon-god, 175, 
!9i, 312, 475, 481, 483> 484, 485, 
486,488,517,538 

Paris-naih, lord (nath) of the Panris 
or traders, the sacred Jain mountain 
on the Burrakur in Chutia Nagpur, 
the ancient Kushika mountain Man- 
dara (which see), 198, 212 

Parisrut, rice beer, 502 

Parjanya, the rain-god, 350 

Parsva, the Jain Tirthakara, whose 
birth coincides with that of St. 
George, 324 

Parthava, Parthus, or Pritha Partha, 
the Parthians, also a name of 
the Pandavas, 211, 328, 373, 587, 
588 

Pasts, the caste who extract palm-wine 
from the date-palm-tree, 1 7 

Patala, ancient port of the Ikshvaku 
and Su-varna kings of the Indus, 55, 
362, 383 

Pates i, Akkadian priest - kings, 321, 
495, 569 



Patoikoi, dwarf-gods of the Phoenicians, 
149, 265 

Patriarchal age succeeding the Ma- 
triarchal instituted by the Basques, 
129, 130 

Patrochcs, a form of the sun-physician, 
149, 306, 338, 400, 491, 507, 639 

Paushya, Pushya, the constellation 
Cancer, 175, 207, 311, 313. See 
Push, Pushan 

Peacock, totem of the Bharatas, the 
sacred bird of the Greek Here, 281, 
360, 362, 429, 519 

Pegasus, the four-starred constellation 
of the sun-horse ruling with the seven 
stars of the Great Bear, the eleven- 
months year, and also the star-horse 
of the sun-god, 208, 304, 306, 329, 
332, 333, 458, 468, 469, 533. See 
Kanthika, Lik-barra. 

Pelasgi, sons of Peleg, 138, 149, 265 

Peleg, the stream Pelagon, Pelasgus, 
139, 149, 150, 151, 5°9, 593 

Peleus, the god of the Potter's clay 
(n-TjAo's), father of Achilles, who got 
the horses of the sun from Poseidon, 
28, 143, 169, 309, 371, 421, 492, 508 

Pelops, winner of the chariot-race of 
the thirteen-months year, 515, 516 

Pen, Pen Samlath, the Brythonic Lady 
(pen) Samlath or Semele, mother of 
Dionysos, 347 

Penelope, the weaver of the web {Trrj"v) 
of Time, the star-wife of Odusseus, 
the year-star-god Orion, xiii., 459, 
462 

Pentecost and the May perambulation 
of boundaries, 538, 540, 559 

Pen-u-el, the tower of the image (pen) 
of God, a conical triangular symbol 
of the divinity, succeeded by the 
worship of the Ephod, 262, 380, 403 

Peplos, the creating Veil, xx., 454, 579 

Perez, the cleft, the male form of Tir- 
hatha, the twin son of Tamar, the 
date-palm-tree, 152, 366 

Persephone, the May-Queen of the 
Pleiades year, 34, 59, 62,85, 137,139, 
163, 369, 375, 401 

Perseus, Assyrian fish-sun-god, born of 
Danae, the Pole Star mother, in the 
tower of the three-years cycle, 282, 
296, 3°3> 498 

Phallic worship of the sons of the eel 
and the antelope plough-god, and of 
the date-palm-tree, 132, 147, 152, 

154,. 155 
Pharsi-pen, the female (pen), and 
Pharsi-pot, the male, trident (fiharsi 



Index. 



6yi 



with two tiger wives, the trident- 
god of the Gonds, 159, 160, 173, 

175. 544 

Philistines, called Kaphtorim, sons of 
the ape, uncircumcised Semites, 38, 
566 

Philoitios, herdsman of the oxen of 
Odusseus, the star Arcturus, 459> 
460 

Phineus, the sea-eagle, 305, 407 

Phlegyas, Phlegyans, Finn warrior fire- 
worshippers of Greece, votaries of 
the Pole Star god, 132, 133, 136 

Phoenicians or sons of the date-palm 
(<poivt£), the Semite offspring of the 
Indian Tur-vasu, 29, 3S, 149, 230, 
234, 247, 250, 265, 368, 519, 566 

Phoenix, the date-palm warden of the 
sun race-course, 508 

Pholos, the Centaur Soma guardian, 
517, Si8 

Phrixus, the roasted (cppiyeo) barley son 
of Athamas or Dumu-zi, Orion ,628, 
629 

Phrygia, Phrygians, land and sons of 
the fire-god Phur or Bhur, 56, 130, 
141, 201, 325 

Picts, the painted races who ate par- 
ched barley, painted their tribal 
totems on their foreheads, and traced 
descent in the female line, 229, 291, 
293; 3io, 335, 336, 437. See Pitaro 
Barishadah 

Picus, the red-headed wood-pecker, the 
sun-bird of the forest races, xxxviii. , 
xxxix., 549, 550 

Pig, a sacred animal of the Phrygians 
and early fire-worshipping races, 37, 

176, 189 

Pigs, seven, the constellation of the 
Great Bear, and a pig triad of gods, 
334- 402 

Pig-tail tonsure of theMossoos, Chinese, 
Mundas, Mexican priests and all 
high-caste Hindus, 347, 574 

Piliyakkha, the god of the Piliyakko 
Plaksha-tree, 91, 92 

Pinaka, Pinga, the musical bow of 
Shiva and the Munda races, SS, 132, 
.590 

Pine-tree as a parent-tree of the Bear 
race, sons of Cybele, 29, 109, 116, 
118,357, 509, 513 

Pifion-nul-lree, parent-tree of the Mexi- 
can sun-god Poshai-yanne, 569. 
See Nut-tree 

Pipal-tree, sacred Hindu fire-drill, 261, 
473> 475' 47S- See Ashvattha 

Pi rit hous, 515, 517 



Pirs, the five Pirs, sons of the barley 
mare, worshipped by the Telis and 
the Hindu races whose priests were 
the barber-surgeons, 337, 342, 343 

Pitarah Somavantah, the rice-eating 
fathers of the Paleolithic founders 
of village communities, 226, 232 

Pitaro Barishadah of the Neolithic 
Age, the Kushika ancestors who, 
like the Picts and American Indians, 
painted their totems on their fore- 
heads, ate parched barley and called 
themselves sons of the Kusha grass 
and buried their dead unburnt, 1 78, 
226, 227, 232, 257, 294, 348, 363, 

436, 437 

Pitaro Gnishvattah, the men of the 
Bronze Age, eaters of barley-por- 
ridge and milk, who burnt their 
dead, 226, 348, 349, 363 

Pitri-yajna sacrifice to the fathers, 
225, 348, 351 

Pilri-yana, the six months from the 
summer to the winter solstice con- 
secrated to the fathers, 22, 570 

Plaksha or Pakur-tree{Fieus infectoria), 
the parent-tree of the offerers of 
animal sacrifices, 91, 184, 301 

Pleiades, the leaders of the stars round 
the Pole in the Matriarchal Age, 
xiii., xiv., xv., xliv., 21, 23, 33, 44, 
45> 48, 5C 54, 55. 63, 90, 93. 97> 
io 9, 137, 160, 164, 231, 283, 428, 
431, 526, 558, 564, 565, 574- 602 

Plough, rules for the construction and 
ceremonial use of Hindu plough 
made of the sacred fig-tree, 68, 423, 
424, 602, 603 

Ploughing festivals beginning the year, 
401, 436, 443, 465 

Pole Star, navel of the sky, house of the 
Supreme Goddess and God, xii., 
xiv., xv., xvi. , 36 — 40, 75, 79, 126 

Pole Star god with one leg and one 
eye, 58, 90, 148. See Cyclops 

Pollux, Poludeukes, the raining Twin- 
god, xix., 254, 263, 508 

Pomcgranitc, a sun-fruit sacred to 
Rimmon, 7, 57, 58, 123 

Pongol, Dravidian festival of the winter 
solstice, 187, 243 

Portunalia, 441, 446 

Portuiius, Portumnos, Etruscan god- 
son of Ino, 446, 640. See Ino, 
Palaimon, Melicertes 

Poseidon, originally the snake-god 
Ercctheus, the holder of the creat- 
ing-trident and the parent of the 
horses of the sun. xxiv., xxxvii , xiv., 



6/2 



Index. 



143, 148, 152, 163, 169, 329, 339, 
360, 371, 512, 513, 514, 515. 631, 
633 

Poshai-ydnne, Mexican sun-god born 
of a nut-tree, 569 

Pot-raj, a Dasahara festival of the 
autumnal equinox, 223, 224 

Potters, sons of Shelah t and the Great 
Potter the Creator, xxi., xxii., 28, 
32, 137, 140, 168, 169, 198, 207, 
220, 221, 329, 426, 491 

Pottery, history of, 113 — 117 

Pra-hasta, the foremost (pra) hand, 
the first year of the three-years cycle- 
year of Ravana, 237 

Prahastri, Hindu teaching-priest, the 
Zend Frashaostra, the national his- 
torian, xxvi., 290, 386 

Prajct-pati, lord (pati) of cultivators 
(praja), the creating- star Orion, 43, 
148, 204, 210, 250, 399, 438, 493, 
494, 502, 503, 504, 505, 525, 543, 
564, 605 

Prastara, the Hindu magic rain-wand, 
first made of Kusha afterwards of 

■ Ashva-vala grass, 7, 124, 227 

Pravargya, ceremony representing the 
birth of the twelve-months year from 
that of thirteen months, 604, 605 

Prithi, Prithu, the mother of the Par- 
thian Pandavas, 211, 249, 328, 373. 
See Kunti 

Proryon, 73, 74, 77, 129. See Pallika 

Property communal among the Dra- 
vidian matriarchal founders of vil- 
lages and its consequent descent in 
the female line ; tribal and appro- 
priated to families and afterwards to 
individuals among the Gotho-Celts, 
13-17. 384-388 

Proteus, the seal-god and his historical 
transformations, 421 

Ptah, the Egyptian dwarf-ape-god, the 
opening (palah) god of the year- 
wielder of the hammer (pattish), and 
subsequently the Great Potter, 149, 

I5°> IS 1 . 341.434 

Punch, the Hindu god of five (pimcli), 
the equivalent of Rama, 454 

Purim Festival of the Jews, 451, 548. 
See Esther 

Purus, Pauravas, sons of Yayati, the 
full moon (ya) god, and Sharmishtha, 
the Banyan-tree worshippers of Kut- 
sa, the moon {kit) god, 180, 181, 182, 
190, 215, 218, 594, 596 

Puryag, Junction of the Jumna and 
Ganges, place of union between the 
immigrating Naga-Kushikas and the 



earlier population of India, 92, 
301 

Pu.se, the alligator in the Gond Song 
of Lingal.iioo, 156, 177 

Push, Pushy a (December — January), 
first month of the Hindu year dating 
from the days when the sun was in 
Pushya Cancer at the winter solstice 
from 14,000 to 15,000 B.C., 174,207, 
243, 311, 401, 592 

Pushan, Pashang, from Push, to grow, 
the Indian form of Lettic Perkunas, 
our Puck, the barley-eating-god who 
married the sun's daughter and whose 
car was drawn by goats, 174, I75> 
208, 313, 317, 401, 496, 503, 591 

Pushtu, Afghan language, 589 

Pytho, Python, the prophetic snake of 
the depths, god of the Delphic oracle, 
the Vedic Ahi Budhnya, 430 

Quipus, recording knotted cords of 

Chinese, Peruvians and Santals, 522 

Quirinal Hill consecrated to Quirinus, 

434. 439. 440 
Quirinal Salii, his dancing-priests, 239 
Quirinalia, 437 
Quirinus, Kurinus, the revolving (Jmr) 

god of the Sabines, 239, 243, 437 

Ra, Rai, Ragh, Raghn, sun-god of the 
North whose worship was thence 
brought by the worshippers of the 
household-fire to India and Egypt, 
xxxv., xl., 50, 151, 152, 154, 207, 
219, 279, l ' , 354, 408, 421, 432, 443, 

587 

Raamah, the god Rama, Raghu, father 
of the Sabasan sons of Sheba, 50 

Rachel, the ewe wife of Jacob and 
mother of Joseph, god of the eleven 
months, and the sun-god Benjamin, 
377, 403, 405 

Radha, the giver of Ra, wife of Nanda 
the bull, the star RohinI Aldebaran, 
427, 432, 434, 464." See Jasoda 

Ragha, on the South of .the Caspian 
Sea, land of Ra and of the three 
races, 154, 408, 587, 588 

Ragu-el, the god Raghu, father of Sara, 
408 

Rahab, Rahabu, the alligator constel- 
lation Draco of the Akkadians, 
Phoenicians and Jews, 100, 137, 378, 
379. 380 

Ra-hu, Raghu, the sun-god worshipped 
by the Dosadhs, his priests, in Behar 
and Kumaon, xl., 50, 57, 165, 186, 
187, 188, 322 



Index. 



673 



Rahulo, the little Ra-hu, son of the 
Buddha, 332, 468, 498 

Rai-Das, parent-god of the Chamars, 
219 

Rai-pur, city of Ra or Rai, 194 

Rain-god, the first god worshipped by 
prayer, 7, 132 

Raja-Suya, Hindu coronation cere- 
mony, 322 

Raj-Gonds, sons of Ra or Rai, 158, 

194, 443- 5 21 
Ram, the Supreme God, 52, 58, 152, 

463 

Ram-sun and sacrifice of a ram to the 
year-god, xxix., xli., 184, 187, 204, 
205, 278, 322, 434 

Rama, son of Raghu, the plougher of 
the sun's year-furrow through the 
zodiacal stars, xvii., xviii., xl., 49, 
50, 52, 119, 152, 153, 187, 189, 207, 
208, 237, 238, 279, 318, 337, 340, 
43 2 » 453> 454- See Abram 

Ram-anu, Rama Hvastra, 52, 188 

Ramnes, sons of the wolf-sun-god, the 
tree-branch {ramus), 438 

Rapha, Repha, the giant-star Canopus, 
73—76, 77 

Raphael, god of the giant-race, 408, 412 

Rat, the constellation Aquarius, 413, 
414, 416, 624, 625 

Rath - jutra, or summer marriage- 
chariot {rath) procession of Krishna 
and Su-bhadra beginning the year 
with the setting of Orion, 236, 237, 

354 
Rathantura or Ratha-tur Soman, the 

turning (tur) of the sun-chariot in 

the last six months of the solstitial 

year, 70, 168 
Rautias, a clan of the Kaurs, 93, 128, 

520 
Ravana, the ten-headed giant of the 

cycle-year overthrown by Rama and 

Lakshman, 64, 119, 208, 237, 238, 

453 

Raven mother-bird, 2$. See Bran, 
Canopus, Shakuna 

Recaranns, the re-creator {kar) of the 
Cacus legend, 442 

Reed-mother of the sons of the rivers, 
85, 139. See Kavad 

Regiu, the rain-god guardian of Sig-urd 
the sun -god, 186 

Rein-deer god and chief domestic ani- 
mal of the Glacial Epoch, 79, 88, 

"3 

Rephaim, early settlers in Syria, sons 
of the giant Repha, xxi., 12, 77, 80, 
144 

\ 



Revati, the constellation Pisces, 208, 

209, 235, 318, 431, 593 
Rex Sacrorum, priest of the Roman 

Regia, home of the national fire, 

434- 435, 44i 

Ribhus, sons of Su-dharvan, the bow 
{dharvan) of Su the mother-bird, the 
rainbow-god, and makers of the cups 
of the seasons, 99, 100, IOI, 130, 
145, 184, 287, 301, 598 

Ribhu-ksha, the third or master {ksha) 
Ribhu of Indra who adds a fourth 
season to the year, 101 

Rishabha, the bull, son of Marudevi, 
the mountain {mam) goddess, and 
Nabhi the navel, the altar fire, first 
Tirtha-kara of the Jains, born about 
15,000 B.C., 19S, 358, 359, 364 

Rishis, the antelope {rishya) priests of 
time representing the months of the 
year and the seven stars of the Great 
Bear, 147, 178 

Ritual essentially conservative, 6, 7 

Rohini, mother-river of the Gautuma 
and Dom building race, 162 

Rohini, the doe and red cow-mother- 
star Aldebaran, Queen of the 
Pleiades, 43, 60, 93, 143, 210, 219, 
399, 411, 427. 489- 565, 606, 633 

Romulus and Remus, twin-sons of the 
wolf-mother-goddess of the Ramnes, 
438 

Ruadan, son of Bres and Briget, the 
year-mother, 71 

Rudra, the red {rud) god ruling the 
year, the equivalent of the Gond 
Bhim-sen, the red-headed-stick-god, 
husband of the three-year star- 
mothers, xl,, 71, 90, 96, 97, 98, 99, 
300 

Rukh, the bird of the breath {ruahh) 
of God, xvi. 

Rukhmi, the tree {rukh) god, and his 
sister Rukmini, 157 



Sabccan Mandaites, 48, 405, 54S 

Sabaans of Southern Arabia, 50, 51, 
52, 63 ; of Haran, 405, 433, 548 

Sacrifice of eldest sons to Hindu, 
Semitic, Greek and Celtic sun-gods, 
232, 234, 244 — 248, 628 ; of the 
Jains, the sacrifice of the former 
man to God by the ascetic culture of 
his moral intuitions, 320 

Sacrifices originally first-fruit offerings 
and sacramental meals of the sap 
and seed of the year-mothcr-tree or 
plant, the milk of the molher-cow 



674 



Index. 



and the pure water brought from 
God as the sap of heaven to generate 
fresh life on earth during the year, 
and its renewal in the bodies of the 
children of the offered gifts. These 
Southern sacrifices became in North- 
ern ritual offerings and sacramental 
meals of the human and animal 
parent totems slain to generate, by 
their blood consumed by their sac- 
rificing children or poured on the 
earth, the birth of a new year-god, 
the re-risen duplicate of his slain 
predecessor ; also to renew fresh life 
in the children of the victim who 
consume their parent god at the 
annual sacrament, 34, 57, 59, 66, 67, 
96, 98, 108, 122, 123, 146, 159, 
184, 185, 187, 223, 244 — 248, 251, 
268, 308, 309, 320, 398 

Sadas, holy house of the Hindu priests 
supported by a pillar of Udumbara 
or sacred fig-tree wood, 393 

Sahadeva, the fire-god of the twin-sons 
of Madri by the Ashvins, the fourth 
Pandava ruling the autumn, 258, 
S.27, 579, 586 

Saivya, the Shiva sun-horse of Krishna, 
328 

Saka-dwipa, Seistan, 154, 170, 173, 
387, 425, 589 

Sdkala, Sangula, capital of the Mad- 
rikas, 179 

Saka-medka, autumn sacrifice to the 
god Sak or Sukra, the earliest form 
of Indra the rain-god, 101, 184, 234, 
347 

Sdkas, Sakyas, sons of the wet (sak) 
god, 154, 355, 467, 589 

Sakh, Sakhr, Sukh, Sukkhi, Sakko, 
Sukus, Sukra, the Indian and Ara- 
bian rain-god, originally the Akka- 
dian wet (sak) god, 50, 69, 101, 154, 
159, 184, 234, 285, 298, 346, 396, 
470, 580. In Soma ritual the god of 
the Shukra cup of summer, 500, 501 

Sakti mountains, 190, 197, 577 

Sakuntala, the little bird, Malli mother 
of the Bharatas, 279, 280, 363, 591 

Sakut (Heb. Succoth), the booths of 
Saka annual New Year's Festival, 
231, 262, 404 

Salal (Boswellia thurifera) of Indra, 
the original incense-tree, 53, 248 

Salii, dancing-priests, 239, 242, 442, 
S40 

Salli-mannu, Solomon, the Akkadian 
sun-fish-god ruling the year, 50, 152, 
278, 551, 585 



Sal-tree (Shorea robusta), parent-tree 
of the Buddha and the Mundas, 
xxvii., 14, 28, 127, 134, 167, 172, 
242, 330, 357, 463, 464 

Samidheni, hymn of eleven stanzas re- 
cited at the opening of the eleven- 
months year, 302, 309 ; of fifteen 
stanzas at the opening of the fifteen- 
months year, 389 ; increased to 
seventeen stanzas in the New Year's 
hymn of the seventeen-months year, 

494 

Samidhs, the kindling-sticks of the 
gods of Spring, the first gods of the 
eleven-months year of four seasons 
invoked in the Apri hymns, 299 

Samims, Sem-i-ramot, Semiramis, 
bisexual-goddess of the Phoenician 
Saka, 84, 230, 231, 233, 236, 237, 
240, 243, 244, 247, 250, 257, 259, 
267, 276, 347, 354, 403, 593 

Samoyedes, 119, 378 

Samuel, son of Hannah the fig-tree, 
380, 391 

Sam-varana, the place of sacrifice, his 
two Avatars, 596, 597, 598 

Santals, 127, 128, 172, 242, 519, 520, 
521, 522, 536 

Sar, Sara, Shar, the cloud-mother of 
corn and grass, 138, 139, 140, 184, 
211, 363, 408, 411, 412, 420 

Sarama, the bitch of the gods who 
seeks the cows of light, the constel- 
lation Argo, 74, 123, 210 

Sarasvati, goddess-mother and river, 
170, 196, 258, 300, 322, 504, 586 

Sardis, capital of Lydia, consecrated 
to Sard Pater, the year (sar, sal) god 
of the Tursena, 262 

Sarganu, Sargon, Serug, 138, 139 

Sarna, sacred grove of the ♦primitive 
villages, 14, 15, 16, 25, 127 

Sat-nam, the true (sat) Name, the 
Chamar God, 220 

Saturn, 335 

Saturnalia, 243 

Satyaki, son of Shini the moon-god- 
dess and year-god of the year of 
eleven months, 179, 329, 330 

Satyavati, goddess of truth (Satya), 
eel-mother of the Hindu royal races, 
131, 191, 425, 592 

Satyrs, hairy races of Asia Minor, 
their ethnology, 120, 121, 201 

Sau-rashtra, kingdom (rashtra) of the 
Sans. Guzerat, 55, 252, 358, 361, 
584 

Sautra-mani, sacrifice of the eleven- 
months year, 301, 321 — 323, 327 



Index. 



675 



Savangha-vach, the eastern (savangha) 
speaker, 155, 170 

Savitar, Savitri, the sun-god and sun- 
maiden, 71, 364, 500 

Savul, Sawul, Saul, sun-god of the 
left thigh, 380, 390, 403, 406 

Saxons, 385 

Scylla, variant ot Ino, 631, 632, 639, 
640 

Seboi, 84, 591 

Sekhet, the lion-headed and scorpion- 
goddess, 531, 533 

Sek Nag, Gond god, worshipped as 
a wooden-snake, the tree-mother- 
snake, 158, 159, 443, 521. See Shesh 
Nag 

Semele, Savilath, Samlah, of Masrekah, 
the vine-land-mother of Dionysos, 
243, 244, 259, 316, 347, 380, 397, 
398, 517, 627 

Semo-Sancits, sowing-god of the parent- 
wet-grass (sag sak), 164,442 

Septemtriones, 124, 335. See Hapto- 
Iringas 

Sesame, Sesamum orientate, the sacred 
oil-plant, xxxiv., 31, 307, 370, 535, 

559 

Set, Suti, Sutekh, the Egyptian ape 
and pig-god, 75, 76, 260, 332, 377, 
533. See Hapi, Kapi 

Sethlans, Etruscan god, son of the 
creating-plant, 260, 261 

Seven offerings to Sek Nag, seven 
Maruts dancing round Indra as he 
slew Vritra, indicating the seven 
stars of the Great Bear as the source 
suggesting the seven-days week of 
the seventeen-months year, 159, 431, 
478 

Seventeen-months year of seven-day 
weeks, 430, 478, 493 ff. 

Seventy, its historical meaning, xlvi., 
636 

Seventy-tzvo weeks of the Pleiades sol- 
stitial and Orion's year, xlvi., 44, 
45, 46, 47, 76, 556 

Shaknna, Shakuni, the raven-star 
Canopus, brother to Gan-dhari, the 
starVega, 23, 24. 218, 258, 309, 482, 
586 

Shalmali (Bombax Heptapliylla), cot- 
ton tree, wood used with Palasha in 
the cars of the Ashvins, the Simul, 
the sacred tree of the offerers of 
human'sacrifices, 395, 570 

Shalya, the year-arrow (s /i a i-y a), king of 
the Madras, whose cognizance is the 
plough, the plough constellation of 
the Great Bear, 78, 179, 213, 428 



Sham-tann, the healing-god, father of 
the Kauravya and Pandava kings, 
178, 191, 424, 425 

Shami-tree (Prosopis spicegcrd), 346 

Shar-ad, the season of the cloud-god- 
dess Shar, the autumnal equinox 
beginning the cycle-year, the season 
of Shraddas or festivals to the dead 
fathers, the Pitaro Barishadah, 225, 
234, 262, 357 

Sharmishtha, the most protecting (shar- 
man) mother, daughter of Vrisha- 
parva, the rain-god, wife of Yayati, 
the Banyan-tree (Ficics Indicd), 181, 
592, 594 

Sharya-Ndvan, the ship (navan) of 
the year-arrow, of which the feathers 
are the Spring, the shaft the Sum- 
mer, the point the Winter, 26, 

295 

Sharyata, son of Manu, the measuring- 
god of the year-arrow, father of Su- 
konga, 391 

Shelah, the spear, the creating fire- 
drill, 137, 148, 159, 306 

Shesh-Nag, Shesh-ai, the Spring-god 
of the Takka trident of the year 
of three seasons, the Gond god Sek- 
Nag (which see), 175, 366, 367, 423 

Shimsu-niara, the constellation of the 
Alligator of fourteen stars round the 
Pole, a form of Draco, 85, 144, 329, 

379 

Shinar, 48, 250 

Shiva, female form of Shiva, 317 

Shiva, Sib, Saiv, the three-eyed god of 
the white shepherd races, the Altaic 
Finns, 83, 85, 250, 313, 329, 344, 
347, 362, 377, 403, 528, 529, 590, 
595 

Shuna-shepa, sacrificed as the New 
Year's dog (svan) of the summer 
solstice, 184, 185 

Shurasena, 590. See Agni-kulas 

Shus, Shu, Shuham, Su, Sans, Su- 
vama, Sanri, trading sons of the 
bird Khu, xv., 55, 230, 252, 258, 
362, 527 

S/mshan, land of the Shus, 56, 303, 

449 
Sliyena, the frost (shya) bird, the Polar 

cloud-bird, whose blood, the rain, 

came to earth as the creating Soma, 

95, 96, 184, 350, 391, 481 
Sig-urd, the pillar (urdr) of victory 

(sig), the conquering sun-god of the 

North, 186, 296, 352, 353, 354, 357, 

420, 491 
Sikhs, followers of Kabir, 157 



6?6 



Index. 



Silures, Basques of South Wales, 276 
Simeon, the great sorcerer, turner of 

the Wheel of Fal, the time-god, the 

Celtic Ixion, 276 
Simul, the red cotton-tree, sacred to 

the Ashvins, 251 
Simurgh, Sin-Murgh, the moon-bird, 

xvi. 
Sin, the moon, Sinai its mountain, 

250 
Sin-dhu, 250, 252, 527, 597 
Sindur-dcm, red mark of marriage 

traced on the parting of the hair of 

Hindu brides, indicating fusion of 

blood, 172, 179, 343 
Sirius, Sharvara, the dog-star, 73, 74, 

143, 296, 366, 376, 440, 456, 579, 

580, 625. See Caleb. 
Sisu, the son, the Easter son of Skanda, 

the sun-lizard-god of the seventeen- 

months year and the seven stars of 

the Great Bear, 525, 538. See Kumara 
Sisu-nag, king of Magadha, 590 
Sita, the star furrow marking the 

annual path of the sun, xviii., 37, 

118, 119, 208, 209, 237, 384, 453, 

454, 463 

Six Gond gods, six clays of the week, 
beginning the year of the Tri-kadru- 
ka festival, 165, 166, 186 

Skanda, the sun-lizard-god of the 
seventeen-months year, 524, 525, 
526, 528, 537, 575 

Snake, the sacred snake ring of the 
cultivated land round the Sarna or 
central village grove, 16 

Snake-race and dance of the Sias, 57 : , 
572 

Sochit, the Egyptian serpent-goddess 
of the constellation Scorpio, 416, 
417. See Sekhet. 

Solwaster, stone circles, 105, 247 

Soma, from root Su, the sacred annual 
sacramental meal, eaten at the New 
Year's sacrifice by all who had been 
consecrated by the Diksha baptismal 
ceremony. It was taken from the 
Drona or hollowed tree-trunk, the 
receptacle, together with the other 
authorised sacrificial ingredients, of 
the rain sent from heaven by the 
cloud-bird Su or Khu, to become 
the sap of the holy mother-tree origi- 
nally the Palasha. Soma became 
also the male moon-god, the crescent 
moon, sender of the rain, 25, 71, 95, 
96, 123, 167,251, 268, 269, 299, 301, 
346, 347, 35°, 364, 365, 392, 393, 
395, 45°, 475, 483, 5oi, 502, 503, 



504, 517, 5i8, 522, 523, 575, 576, 
577, 612 
Soma Pavamana, the wind and rain- 
god, to whom all the hymns of the 
Ninth Mandala of the Rigveda are 
addressed, 392 
Sone, the river of gold, 157, 248, 358 
Sona-pet, the womb of gold, 249, 358 
Sonar, the Sau dealers in gold, 358 
Spy Onoz, its cave and skeletons, no, 
in, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116,121, 140 
Srinjayas, men of the sickle {srini), 
name of the Panchalas, rulers of 
North India, 41, 204, 211, 588, 591 
Stan-eshvara, the gnomon-pillar-god 
{eslwar), the leader of the eleven 
Rudras, the months of the eleven- 
months year, 295 
Stone Calendars of Britany, 266 — 269 
Stonehenge, 105, 476, 477 
Su or Shu, the cloud-bird Khu, xv. , 
55, 39 *• $ ee Shus, Khu. 
^Suastika, Su-ashtaka, the sacred sym- 
bol of the circling sun, xxxv., 
xxxvi., 271, 272, 471, 547, 550 
Su-bama or Su-varna Baniks, 36 1' 
Su-bhadra, the blessed {bhadra) Su- 
bird, twin sister of Krishna, 99, 191, 
234, 235, 244, 327, 354, 481, 519, 

521, 537 

Subon - rik/ia^ Su - varna - riksha, the 
river of the Su-varna, the sons of Su, 

248, 359 
Stidas, the giver of Su, son of Divo- 
dasa, and grandson of Vadhri-ashva, 
the gelt horse, 586, 592, 594, 595, 

596 

Su-dharvan, the bow [dkarvan) of Su, 
father of the Ribhus, 99 

Suevi, Swabians, 385 

Su-griva, the ape with the neck (griva) 
of Su, the bird-headed Pole Star ape 
who married Tara the Pole Star 
after the death of Vali the circler 
(vrz), the ape who turned the stars 
with his hand. The substitution of 
Su-griva for Vali recorded in the 
story of Rama marks the change in 
the year-reckoning adopted in the 
year of Rama and Sita, the furrow, 
between 14,000 and 15,000 B.C., 
when the change of Pole Stars in 
the Polar circle and the measure- 
ment of time by the passage of the sun 
through the zodiacal signs was recog- 
nised, 36,37, 97,1 19, 143, 199,328,334 

Su-jata, and the Buddha god of the 
year of the eight-rayed star, 470, 
487, 503, 53° 



Index. 



677 



Su-koniyd, Surld, the sun-bride of the 
moon-god Soma, wedded in Magh 
(January — February) about 10,000 
B.C., the marriage being consum- 
mated in February — .March, 391, 
395, 419, 440, 450, 475, 515, 575 

Sumerians, the Indian settlers in the 
Euphratean Delta, 48 

Surd, intoxicating drink originally 
drunk at sacrifices, infused in the 
Soma of the Sautramani sacrifice of 
the eleven-months year, and pre- 
pared apart from the pure Soma in 
the Vajapeya sacrifice of the seven- 
teen-months year, 301, 321, 322, 32S, 
502, 503, 504, 517, 518 

Susi-nag, the snake-god of the Shus of 
Shushan whose image was depicted 
on the Parthian banners, 56, 211 

Su-shravas, the glory of the Shus, the 
Sanskrit form of the Zend Hu-shrava, 
conqueror of Kutsa the moon (ku) 
god of the eleven-months year, 182, 
230 

SuS'Sistinnako, the creating-spider of 
the Sias of Mexico, the Spinning 
Pleiades, 565, 571 

Su-ydma, the twin (yama) birth stars 
Gemini presiding at the births of the 
Buddha, 464 



Ta-khu Aquila, 367, 373 

Takka-sila, Taxila, the city ot the 
Takkas, 383, 423, 616 

Takkas, Tugras, Trigarlas, the wor- 
shippers of the Yupa or trident 
sacrificial stake and the sacrificers 
of three animal victims in three (tri) 
pits (gartas) bound to three sacri- 
ficial stakes (drupadas), xxii., xxiv., 
135, 175, 176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 
185, 198, 200, 486, 590, 591, 595, 

633 
Taksk-nag, Takshaka, the winter- god, 
the third prong of the Takka trident 
of the three seasons, 175, 191, 313, 

367, 423 
Tamaj-, the date-palm-tree-mother of 

the Semite Phoenicians, sons of the 

date-palm (<po?vi£), 152, 275, 366, 

422, 523 
Tamluk, Tamralipti, the copper 

(tdmra) port of Bengal, 359, 360, 

36i, 583 
Tammuz, Hebrew form of Dumu-zi 

(which see) 
Tan, Tana, the mud (tan) goddess 

and god author of life, the Southern 



goddess Bahu (which see), 26, 27, 29, 
32, 33. 34, 261, 295, 397 
Tanais, Tanit, Thenet, the Cartha- 
ginian goddess Tan, 235, 397 
Tan-eshur, the Indian shrine of the 

god (eshur) Tan, 26, 261, 295 
Tan-nim, Hebrews sons of Tan, 27 
Tanu-napdt, the self-producer, the god 

of summer, 299 
Too, the creating-path, xiii. , 479, 597 
Tapassu, Tapas, Tapati, 480, 598 
Tar, the Hittite goat-god, 170. See 

Dara 
Tara, the ape Pole Star goddess, 36, 

97, 199, 333, 334 

Tan Pennu, the female (pen) Tara 
goddess of the Kandhs of Orissa and 
the Indian Tur-vasu, 274, 309, 347 

Tdrkshya, son of Trikshi, 271, 316. 
See Trikshi 

Taurus, constellation of, xix., 143, 415, 
418, 484, 585, 599, 600 

7avati/nsa,ihe second historical heaven 
of the Buddhist chronology ruled by 
the god Sakko, that of the thirty- 
three gods ruling the thirty-three 
days of the month of the eleven- 
months year, 298, 470, 473 

Telchlnes, their place in history, xxiv., 

XXV. 

Tells, the caste-guild makers of the 
sacred Sesame oil, 31, 307, 308, 333, 

335 

Temenos, sacred enclosure round Gre- 
cian temples answering to the land 
consecrated in a Hindu village to 
the snake-guardian of the mother- 
grove, 247 

Templum, the consecrated field of the 
Roman augur, the Greek Temenos, 
the Indian four-cornered field of 
Varuna, 256 

Ten kings of Babylon, their year, 414, 
415, 532, 636, 637, 638 

Tenth cup allotted to the Ashvins, the 
stars Gemini, as gods of the ten 
months of gestation of the cycle-year, 

394 

Teucer, 404 

Theseus, 239, 404 

Thesmophoria, Greek festival answer- 
ing to the Southern Feast of First- 
fruits at the beginning of the Pleiades 
year, 57, 59, 62, 135, 203, 404 

Thetis, the mud (thith) goddess-mother 
of Achilles the sun-god, 27, 306, 309, 
371.421 

Thigh constellation of the Great Bear, 
parent of the sun-god, the Thigh of 



6?8 



Index. 



Set or Hapi the ape-god, xvii., xx. , 
xxxvii., 390, 396, 397, 399 

Thigh, sacrifice of, (1) the left thigh, 
333, 39i> 403. 407, 408, 482 ; (2) 
the right thigh, 390, 391, 406 

Thigh, the wounded and withered left 
thigh of the year-gods of the eleven- 
months year, Cuchulainn, Jacob 
and Odusseus, 403, 407, 408, 458, 

459 
Thigh, the year of the, beginning about 

10,000 B.C., when the sun was in 

Gemini in January — February, 419 
Thighs, both thighs of the year-god 

of the lunar solar age broken, 482, 

r 483, 5°9 

Thirteen Buddhist Theris, and thirteen 
wives of Kashyapa, ruling the thir- 
teen months of the year, 488, 522 

Thirty-three days of the month of the 
eleven-months year, 298 

Thirty-six weeks of the half-year of the 
year of seventy-two weeks, the thirty- 
six steps of Vishnu, the year-god, 46, 
47, 67. See Brihati 

Thoas, Ta'uz, forms of Dumu-zi {which 
^e), 31, 93, 352 

Thor, god of the hammer, drawn by 
goats, 152 

Thoth, Taut, Tut, forms ofDhu-ti, the 
bird (dhu) of life (ti), (which see), 
xx., xxi., 534 

Thraetaona, the Semite Zend god of 
the cycle- year, 49, 213, 214 

Three months passed by the infant sun- 
god in traversing the thirty stars 
under the guardianship of the moon, 
and the three months' trance of Cu- 
chulainn, 332, 333, 488, 489 

Tluiroh, Hebrew Thorah, the law, 
name of Harmonia, xxi. 

Tia-mut, mother of living things (tid), 
goddess of the Pole Star age, mother 
of eleven-fold offspring, the months 
of the eleven-months year, 24, 303, 

451 

Tiger wives of the trident of Pharsi- 
pot, mothers of the sons of the tiger, 
160, 161, 331, 333, 336 

Tirhatha, fish-goddess of the Cleft or 
rock-pool, also called Derceto Ater- 
gatis, 177, 209, 230, 231, 233, 366, 
591 

Tishtrya Sinus, 183, 198, 203, 366 

Ti-tans, 27, 399 

Tithis, Hindu lunar days, measure- 
ment of time by, 456, 457, 538 

Tobit, Tobias, 408, 409, 410, 41 1, 412, 
413, 420 



Todas, 121, 122, 123, 168, 224 
Toltecs of Mexico, xxxv. , 563 
Tree-mother of the South, xvi., xxviii., 

28, 29, 30, 31 
Triads, first the three mother-seasons 
in the Tri-ambika festival of the 
three star-mothers, 96-98 ; the three 
prongs of the three seasons of the 
Gond female [pen) trident of Pharsi- 
pen, which became that of the father- 
god Pharsi-pot with his two wives, 
the god of the Pot-raj festival and 
the Takka trident, 160, 175 

Tri-ambika festival, 96, 98, 234 

Triangle depicting the parent-gods of 
the three seasons of the year, 135, 
228, 301, 393. See Paridhis 

Trident, Trisilla, of the Gond Tak- 
kas, that of the male gods ruling the 
three seasons of the year, which 
became the trident of Poseidon and 
of the Japanese twin-creators, the 
three roots of the world's tree Ygg- 
drasil, xxii., xxxvii., 72, 8^, 175, 
190, 544, 633 

Tri-kadru-ka, the New Year's festival 
of the year of six-day weeks, to the 
three tree-mothers, 166, 186, 349, 
544 

Trikshi, the ass-god preceding his son 
Tarkshya, the god of the horse's 
head of the eleven-months year of 
the Telchines, xxiii., xxiv., xxv. 

Triptolemus, 401, 402 

Tri-sankhya, king of the three (tri) 
numbers (sankhya), the three stars 
Lyra with Vega at their apex, 279, 
280 

Tri-skelion, the three-legged symbol 
preceding the Su-astika, xxxvi., 
xxxvii. 

Trislubh, metre of eleven syllables, 
symbolising the eleven-months year, 
66, 494, 602, 608 

Tuan, son of Starn, the Pole Star, 
primaeval history as told by him, 274, 
278 

Tuatha De Danann, Celtic sons of 
Danu, the Pole Star goddess, the 
mound - builders of the Neolithic 
Age, 39, 64, 66, 71, 130, 276, 277, 
284 

Tur-an, Etruscan mother-goddess, 256 

Tur-ayyd, the Arabian Pleiades, 53, 

54 
Turmeric, the sacred plant (Huldi) 

of the yellow races, 162, 308, 309. 

See Dravidians 
Turos (Dihnun, Bahrein), the island- 



Index. 



679 



home of the Phoenicians in the Per- 
sian Gulf, 38, 250 
Tursa, Cerfia, the tower (tnr) goddess 
of the Iguvine triad , to whom heifers 
and sheep were offered, 543, 544, 

546, 547 r . , 

Tier Turn, the Pole Star god of night, 
who turns the Pole and the stars 
ruling the year, 75, 256 
Tur-vasu, Tursena, Tursha, Turano- 
Dravidian Semites, the parents of 
the Phoenician trading races, who 
first from India established maritime 
trade in the Indian Ocean and Medi- 
terranean, xxxv., ii, 38, 177, 182, 
217, 229, 249, 250, 253, 256, 257, 
262, 266, 347, 367, 368, 391, 583, 

588. 591 
Tusita, the fourth of the historical 
heavens of Buddhist theology, that 
of wealth (tuso) and of the Vessan- 
tara birth of the Buddha, 463, 473, 

537 
Tvashtar, the god of the solstitial year 

of two {tvd) seasons, 22, 298, 300 
Twelve days' rest of the sun-god at the 

end of the year, and the historical 

meaning of Twelfth Night, 89, 101, 

102, 103, 454, 540 
Twenty-seven days of the month of the 

cycle-year, xli., xlii., 205, 206, 488 
Twin-gods of time of the Kabiri and of 

the Mexicans, xxiii., 147, 567, 568. 

See Mithuna 
Twrch Trwyth, the boar-god and his 

seven pig-sons, the seven stars of the 

Great Bear, 335, 336 
Tyndareus, Tydens, the hammer (tud) 

god of the Kabiri, father of Diome- 

des and Kastor, 254 
Typhoon, Greek Tnphon, the storm- 
wind of Baal Tsephon, Pole Star 

god of the North, 37, 76 



Ucchai-shravas, the ass of Indra with 

long ears, xxiii., 198, 202 
Uchehuyr, Cymric equivalents of 

Ooraon Bhunhiars, 288, 290 
Udnmbara, Ficus Glomerata, sacred 

Hindu fig-tree, its ritualistic uses, 

2 7°. 393. 423> 497. 5o6, 5 IO > 602, 

603, 605, 606 
Ugro-Finn races, sons of Ukko, xvii., 

168, 194, 294, 328, 357, 362, 378, 

518, 520, 529 
Ugras or Ogres, sons of Kansa the 

moon-goose, xvii., 317, 319 
Ugrosena, father of the Ugras of the 



moon-falchion {itgur) and Kansa, 
xvii., 317,362, 374, 518, 519 

Ukko, the Finn rain and storm-bird, 
third god of the national Triad who 
dwells in the navel of heaven, the 
Pole Star, xvii., 126 

Ukthya, Springcup of the Vajapeya 
sacrifice, 500, 501, 503 

Uluha, owl-god of the age of incense- 
worship, son of Shakuni the raven, 
257, 258 

Uma, Flax wife of Shiva, S3, 250, 590 

Umur-kuntak, where the Sone and 
Nerbudda rise, the navel of Indra, 

157 
Upasads, Soma sacrifices to the three 

seasons, 604, 605 
Ural- Altaic Finns, 85, 86 
Urdar, fountain of the Ygg-drasil, 
_xxii. _ 
Urja, Urja Stambha, the Thigh (urn) 

god, 396 
Uriah the Hittite, 422 
Ursula Horsel, the Little Bear, 337 
Ushinara, man of the East {nsk), 

father of Shiva ; his daughter, Ush'i- 

narl, mother of Kakshivat, 64, 311, 

59°, 59i 
Utanka, the weaver (nt) of time, 312, 

313, 314 

Ulher Bran of the wonderful head, 
the gnomon-stone father of Arthur 
or Airem the plough-god, 64, 539 

Ufset, the Sia mother of corn, 566, 
57o, 573, 574, 579 

Utlanapad, the mother-goddess with 
the outstretched (nttaua) legs, the 
two productive thighs of the firma- 
ment-mother of Aditi and Daksha, 

425 

Uttara, the Great Bear constellation, 
the North charioteer son of king 
Virata, 151, 190, 329, 367, 484 

Uttara, the Pole Star mother of the 
sun - god Parikshit, daughter of 
Virata the Viru, 190, 483 

Uz-Uzava, the goat-god, 85, 141, 376 



Vadavu-makha, he who speaks with 
the left, the left thigh-god, 396 

Vadhri Ashva, the gelded (vadhri) 
horse, the sexless sun-god of the 
fifteen-months year, father of Divo- 
dasa, the father of Siidas, 586 

Vdhlikas, men of Balkh, Bactrian 
sons of Vahlika, the Takka bearers 
of the trident of the Yupa or sacri- 
ficial stake, 178, 591 



68o 



Index. 



Vai-kama, two-horned Naga races of 

Kashmir, worshippers of Kama the 

horned-god, 592, 594 
Varna moinen, the senior god of the 

Finn triad, 226 
Vaishvadeva, the gods of the village 

(vish), 101, 347, 400 
Vaishvanara, Agni household-fire of 

the village (vish) and son of the tree 

(vanam), 186, 591. See Vastospati 
Vaishya, men of the village (vish), the 

yellow race, 141, 308, 504, 551, 578 
Vajapeya, sacrifice of the seventeen- 

months year, 492, 499, 500, 502, 503 
Vajjians, sons of the tiger (viaghra), 

their eighteen tribes, 160, 161, 

333 
Vajrastm, the thunder bolt (vajra) 
throne of the Buddha, 475, 476 

Vala-rama, the revolving (vri) Rama 
called Hal-ayudha, he who has the 
plough (lial), the Great Bear, for his 
weapon, son of Rohini Aldebaran, 
the Queen of the Pleiades, and 
Nanda the bull constellation Taurus, 
the Naga Great Bear ruler of the 
eleven-months year preceding Krish- 
na niling the fifteen-months year, 
427, 428, 43i> 577, 578 

Vali, the turning (vri) Pole Star god, 
first husband of Tara the Pole Star 
mother, 199 

Vanant, the Zend constellation Corvus, 
426 

Vanas-pati, Vena, Venus, Lord (pati) 
of the wood (vanam), the central 
mother-tree of the village grove, 
the tenth god invoked in the Aprl 
hymns, 49, 300 

Varsha-giras, praisers (giras) of rain, 
name of the Nahusha, 126 

Varnna, the covering (var) rain-god, 
the Lokapala of the North god. of 
summer and of barley, 27, 101, 301, 
302, 321, 346, 347, 393, 434, 503 

Vashistha, Zend Vazista, god of the 
most creating (vasu) fire burning 
perpetually on the altar, 42, 70, 181, 
311, 312, 396, 424, 587, 594, 596 

Vastos-pati, Lord (pati) of the house 
or city (vastos), the household and 
national fire-god, son of Orion and 
Aldebaran, the star rulers of the 
year, 43, 89 

Vasu, the creator-god of the Chiroos, 
sons of the bird (chir), xxxiii., 131, 
190, 197, 213, 427, 577 

Vasu-deva, father of Krishna, the black 
antelope-god, 427, 490, 577, 578 



Vasuk, Vasuki, central summer-god of 
the Takka trident, xxii., xxxiii., 
xxxvi., 175, 190, 197, 198, 271, 357, 
365, 367, 423 

Vedi Uttara, North altar of knowledge, 
originally made in the form of a 
woman, 227, 301, 393, 501, 506, 604, 
606 

Vega in Lyra, Pole Star from 10,000 
to 8000 B.C., xl., 8, 97, 207, 280, 
309, 311, 324, 368, 373, 419, 429, 
. 455, 526, 527 

Vertumnus, the turning (verto) mid- 
year-god of the year, 34, 445, 641 

Vessantara, birth of the Buddha in the 
Tusita heaven of wealth (tuso), when 
the sun was in Gemini about 8200 
B.C., 463, 472, 473, 474, 475, 484, 

487, 537 . 
Vestal Virgins consecrated to the ser- 
vice of the goddess Vesta, the Greek 
Hestia, the central fire-goddess in 
every village, survivals of the age 
when the priestesses and guardians 
of the household and national fires 
were the wife and daughters of the 
master of the household-fire, and in 
villages of the Headman of the vil- 
lage dwelling in the central Gemeinde 
Haus or Hotel de Ville of the vil- 
lage (p. 12). This became in Rome 
the Regia, the home of the fire of 
Vesta ruled by the Rex Sacrorum, 
the survivor of the village Headman, 

3i5>323 

Vetasu, sons of the reed (vetasu), wor- 
shippers of Kutsa the moon (ku) god, 
180, 182 

Vi-chitra Virya, the Polar father (virti) 
of the two (vi) colours (chitra), 
reputed father of the Kauravyas and 
Pandavas, replaced by Vyasa the 
constellation Draco, 97, 195, 425 

Vid-arba, the double four (arba) name 
of Central India, the home of the 
eight tribes of Gonds, 365, 366, 444 

Vinalia on the 23rd of April, St. 
George's Day, 325 (see Palilia) ; 
as a mid-year festival on the 19th 
August, 447, 448 

Vinata, tenth wife of Kashyapa and 
tenth month of the year of thirteen 
months, 517, 526, 562 

Virata, sons of the Viru or phallus, 
the Polar fire-drill ; also called the 
Matsya, sons of the eel, 131, 151, 
182, 328 

Virbius, a form of Hippolytus (zvhich 
see), the male form of the goddess 



Index. 



68 1 



Tana, goddess of the sacred groves, 

34. 340 

Virgo, star-mother of corn, xxiv. , 28, 
180, 191, 316, 324, 325, 326, 327, 

341, 374- 375, 415, 455. 586- See 
Chitra, Min 

Vint, the phallic-father-god, 42, 131, 
132, 182, 191 

Pi-sakha, Vaisakh (April — May), mid- 
month of the Pleiades year, 22, 23, 
64, 165, 174, 324, 326, 487, 525, 
526, 537, 538 

Vishnu, the year-god of the village 
(vish), a log of wood, the trunk of 
the parent-tree measuring time by 
its spring leaves, its summer flowers 
and fruit, and its winter nakedness, 
31, 46, 67, 69, 70, 72, 158, 184, 349, 
35°, 35 1 , 360, 361, 362, 461, 528, 
590 

Vishva-milra, the friend {milra) of the 
village (vish) races, father of Sakun- 
tala, the little bird, the cloud-bird 
of the Mallis and mother of the 
Bharatas. He was the priest-god of 
the Bharatas, 279, 280, 311, 502, 

587, 591, 594 
Vivasvat, Vivasvan, the two lights 

morning and evening, 305, 598 
Vohu-Fryano, second of the five Zend 

parent-fires, that of the Viru, 42, 131 
Volterra beginning its year at the 

autumnal equinox, 263 
Vriddha-kshatra , the Pole Star god, 

5.27, 529 

Vrisha-kapi, the original rain (vrisha) 
ape (kapi) mother, 35, 397, 546 

Vritra, the circling (vri) snake, the 
original guardian-snake of village 
matriarchal theology slain by Indra, 
xxviii., 100, 295, 349, 350, 352, 
367, 431, 501, 507. See Azi Da- 
haka 

Vyasa, Vyansa, the alligator constel- 
lation Draco, son of Satya-vati, the 
eel-mother-goddess of the sons of 
the rivers and grandfather of the 
Kauravyas and Pandavas, 97, 184, 
191. 361, 379, 580 

Walnut-mother-tree of the sun-god, 
461, 462 

Wether, the sexless animal sacrificed 
on their New Year's day, by the 
Sabrean Mundaites and the men of 
the eleven-months year, 302, 405 

Wolf, goddess of light of the fire- 
worshippers, 1S5, 245, 282, 283, 
438. See Apollo LycffiUS 



Wood-pecker, red-headed, the original 
sun-bird which became the red- 
capped Goblin, the Irish Lepre- 
chaun, guardian of treasure, xxxviii. r 
xxxix. , xl., 549, 550 



Xanthus, the yellow river where Apollo 
the wolf-sun-god and Artemis the 
Bear mother were born, 383, 391, 
438 

Xzsuthros, tenth king of Babylon, 
saved from the Flood, the Star Skat 
in Aquarius, 414, 415, 636 



Yadavas, sons of Yadu, the full-moon 
{Yd) god, 249, 391, 577, 57 8 r 
588 

Yadu-Turvasu, 181, 249, 361, 584, 
585, 586, 612. See Turvasu 

Yajush-mati, the 360 bricks of the 
brick-altar laid with ritualistic for- 
mulas, 609, 610 

Yakshus, 592, 593, 596 

Yamaloka, the third of the historical 
heavens of Buddhist theology, that 
of the Twins Gemini, under whose 
care, as the twins Su-yama, the 
Buddha was born in his Mah-osadha 
birth as the sun physician about 
10,200 B.C., 463, 464, 473 

Yamuna, the Jumna river of the twins 
(lama), 191, 592, 595 

Yatudhana, the wizard Finns of Seis- 
tan, 79 

Yavadiya, the barley -sun -mare, mother 
of the horse of Guga, one of the 
Five Pirs, 337, 353 

Yavanas, sons of the barley (yava), 
249, 35°, 3 6 2, 3 6 8, 592 

Yav-yavati, river of the barley (yava) 
granaries, name of the Jumna, 
211 

Ya'ya, the Mexican corn-baby, the 
idol of the Sia antelope-priests re- 
newed every four years, 570 

Yayati, the full-moon ( Ya) god, son of 
Nahusha, 181, 271, 365, 592, 

594 

Ya-ytivata, full-moon (Ya) sect, 271,. 

365 
Yelloio Finn races, sons of turmeric, 

80, 308, 309, 465 
Ygg-drasil, the parent ash-tree of the 

Edda, xxii., 29, 306, 309, 33S 
Y/uin, the roaring creating-giant of 

the Edda whose hair was grass ami 

trees, 33S, 342 



Y y 



682 



Index. 



Yudishthira , the eldest Pandava, 
born under Virgo about 10,200 B.C., 
368, 373, 374, 375, 527, 579, 580, 
581 

Yupa, the three-pronged sacrificial- 
stake of the Takkas, 178, 271, 

633 

Yuyutsu, the Vaishya king succeeding 
the Pandavas, 578 

Zarathustta, Zaotar, the inspired pro- 



phet born from a tree, who spoke 

the language of birds, 26, 28, 262, 

298 
Zeus, originally the god Tan or Danu, 

xxi., 29, 32, 33 
Zeus Lykaios and Laphystios, to whom 

human sacrifices were offered, 245, 

246, 247, 248, 628 
Zu, Akkadian storm-bird, form of 

Khu, xv., 55 



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